Open and close your eyes. Wakes is the place in between, half-awake, half-asleep. A threshold where two psychic spaces communicate. Where hallucination spills over into the world, and where the world, in turn, contaminates hallucination.
For his third exhibition at Konrad Fischer Galerie, David Douard articulates a suspended universe in which the emblematic elements of his practice unfold. Floral contaminations, masks, and poems come together around an intimate energy. Raw materials, wood, aluminium, glass, accommodate a surprisingly harmonious movement.
A proliferation of forms spreads a conversation throughout the space. The sculptures, onto which aluminium masks and glass orbs are attached, become entwined with softly metallic drawings. An echo emerges and finds a way into the gestures of the paintings. The frames, meanwhile, recall the plinths on which certain works unfold, creating a subtle play of correspondences. What brings the works together is the grid, the wood of the plinths, and the line that appears across the majority of the works.
The exhibition offers a reflection on the practices of sculpture and painting, mobilizing figures such as the plinth, the frame, and the grid. Through these elements, David Douard works in the manner of a personal diary, inserting into his works the music he listens to, a found object, or the memory of a walk.
David Douard (b. 1983, Perpignan) lives and works in Paris. His practice is grounded in language, which he treats as a mutable, circulating material. Drawing from literary, poetic, and vernacular sources-often shaped by the conditions of digital culture-Douard transforms text into sculptural and spatial forms. Language enters his work as something unstable and embodied, reconfiguring exhibition space as a hybrid, collective environment marked by contamination, fragmentation, and affect.
Working primarily with sculpture and installation, and incorporating painting, text, and heterogeneous materials, Douard produces environments that appear provisional, damaged, or infected. His works often resemble prosthetic structures or compromised bodies, where surfaces carry traces of writing, erosion, and interruption.
Emerging from a generation shaped by networked communication, Douard is frequently positioned adjacent to post-digital practice, while remaining distinct from its technological or image-based tendencies. Rather than representing digital culture, his practice registers its psychological and linguistic effects, treating the digital as an internalized condition rather than a visible system.
Douard graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2011 and has taught at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy since 2022. His work has been presented internationally at institutions including UCCA Dune Art Museum, Qinhuangdao; Serralves Museum, Porto; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fridericianum, Kassel; Sculpture Center, New York; and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and has featured in major biennials such as the Lyon, Taipei, Gwangju, and Belgrade Biennials. He was a fellow at the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici (2017-18), and received the Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize in 2017. His works are held in prominent public and private collections, including ICA Miami; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Collection Pinault, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris; and CNAP, Paris.
