Borkin, Composition, Collage, 1994, Framed

Borkin.

Born in Nice in 1932.

Gluing to old paper. 1994.

Paper collages on plywood.

Signed and dated lower center. 47 x 57cm framed.

Born in Nice on May 27, 1932, Borkin is an anonymous French visual artist and painter. Leaving doubt about his identity and his true professional career, he declares to have been a doctor, lawyer, notary and even a lumberjack. He has been active in Paris, Quimper and on the Côte d'Azur since the 1970s according to the dates of his known works. However, his urban collages or ephemeral graffiti have been present since the 1960s in Paris and Nice and its surroundings.

His father, from a Russian aristocratic family who fled the U.S.S.R. during the Bolshevik revolutions met his future wife in Paris. His mother, originally from Odessa, found herself in Paris for similar reasons, knowing that her family was part of an intellectual elite.

Borkin says he was “electrocuted” by Beatlemania, as if “artistic expression should overflow everywhere in our lives”: music, painting, sculpture, everything was for him a pretext for madness and excess, but above all for the freedom to make a work from nothing, from common and insignificant everyday objects. Seduced by the concept of ready-made, he quickly tired of Marcel Duchamp's "artistic inaction": "The idea is good and shocking when the work is presented, but the impact is short-lived, the emotion must be renewed each time we pass in front of the work." Borkin's real artistic turning point came when he discovered the work of Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé: “My way of seeing things around them radically changed my life! A different world view made me a different man! ". Just like his professional career, Borkin still leaves doubt about his relationships with Hains and Villeglé. He describes himself as being “close”, “friend”, “spiritual student” or also speaks of Villeglé as a “guru”.

Borkin currently lives in Morbihan, by the sea, the only place according to him where life never stops. “I am genealogically marked by flight, the idea of ​​a country without a sea terrifies me! No escape possible offshore, surrounded by foreign countries which decide my fate or not... I prefer the possibility of a marine escape with the key, the possible discovery of a desert island, who has never dreamed of that? »

Exhibitions:

-Urban Collages (1960 to 2000)
-Étienne de Causans Gallery, from April 22 to 29, 1993; 25, rue de Seine, 75006 PARIS