Born in 1970, Mathieu Mercier is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Bourges and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize, while the Centre Pompidou dedicated a solo exhibition to him. In 2007, his work was exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC and then at the Kunsthalle of Nuremberg in 2008. Since then, he has had numerous large-scale exhibitions: at the CREDAC in Ivry (2012), at FRI-ART (Freiburg) 2012, at the Ricard Foundation (2012), at the Kunstmuseum in St Gallen (2014), at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen (2014), at the Portique art center in Le Havre (2018) and at the Frac Normandie Caen in 2019. At the heart of Mathieu Mercier's approach is a current preoccupation: the definition of the place of the object both in the consumer industry and in the field of art. His work proposes a permanent reflection on the symbolic and utilitarian functions of objects.