Charlemagne Palestine

Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York, USA.
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Multimedia artist mainly recognized as a minimalist musician and visual artist, he uses many media that he worked in multiple forms: painting, sculpture, music, video, performance.
His first approach to ritual music dates back to his childhood, when he sang traditional music in synagogues. He then discovers the sound produced by church bells, which inspires him in his development of a «minimalist» style based on the repetition of sound and its duration and harmonic function, in a music with a unique and personal style.
After studying at various American universities, he began a career as a singer in New York, painter, pianist, sculptor and performer while composing music and performing in these alternative venues that emerged throughout America and Europe in the early 1960s.
From 1967, he began working on sound using electronic equipment, projecting and sculpting it in space by integrating instruments and voices.
In the 1970s, he began experimenting with a new form of body art performance, coinciding body and movement in time and space, commonly known as body music. It was at this time that with the American choreographer and dancer Simone Forti he inaugurated a new form of performances including Illuminations, which they will produce in America and Europe. With this work, he discovers the piano Bösendorfer which will inspire him to create a series of minimalist musical forms. Called Strumming music, these are improvisations for piano with repetitive sounds that provide the viewer with sensations close to trance. He also uses video to render/ fix the energy intensity and physical violence he spends in his concerts. But from 1980, disappointed by the world of video art, he stopped making tapes and reflected on the sad uniformity of television programs both in content and editing and founded in 1987 a non-profit organization Ethnology Cinema Project, dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of videos that deal with traditional cultures around the world since the turn of the century.
Placed on the piano, a plush mascot always accompanies it and does not cease proliferating over the years. Thus, dozens of cuddly accomplices are crammed at the foot of the piano; these little bears and other fetishes related to childhood become during the 80s the raw material of his plastic achievements, most often in the form of installations. Iconic figures buried in the collective unconscious, Charlemagne Palestine raises them in his works to the rank of sacred deities, in the form of altars or totem such as God Bear, this bear with 2 bodies and 3 heads of 5 m high, inaugurated at Documenta 8 in Kassel (1987) and has since embarked on a long journey through museums and galleries around the world.
Two solo exhibitions of Charlemagne Palestine took place at the Lara Vincy gallery: pingmingding in 2002 and divinitiessss with Kevin Clarke in 2017.