Jean-Michel Folon was born in 1934 in Belgium near Brussels and died in 2005 in Monaco.
He has worked and created with many materials and in many fields: watercolor, printmaking, sculpture, tapestries, paintings, stamps, theater sets. His work is inspired by the principles of poetry. He abandoned his Architecture studies to dedicate himself entirely to drawing and moved to Paris in 1960.
His first drawings were published in New York magazines such as “Esquire”, “Horizon” or “The New Yorker”. His style, characterized by large gradients in watercolor and the use of recurring characters in the schematic outline, stands out in the field of illustration. The characters’ wandering weightless in vast barren landscapes and enigmatic urban spaces, which echoes the questions of the Western society at the time, are probably the best aspect of his work. He illustrated for Amnesty International in 1988 for the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
In 1981, he created with Luigi Guardigli a 10 square meters ceramic mosaic for RTBF’s headquarters in Brussels.
Among other exhibitions, he had solo shows at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels (1975), the Lefebre Gallery in New York and Alice Pauli Gallery in Lausanne (1979). In 1990 a major exhibition brought together his works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The artist founded his own museum, the “Fondation Folon” in 2000, located in La Hulpe Solvay in Belgium.
www.folon-art.com