Pierre Desrosiers began his career as a magazine illustrator and comic strip writer. After studying in Toronto and New York, he completed an MFA at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 1988. As his thesis project, he presented Les œuvres vraies d’un artiste fictif, Pierre-Louis Desringuerre, 1880-1937 at the Galerie de l’UQAM. This vast installation was conceived to be the pseudo-reconstruction of an imaginary artist’s work. Humorous, playful and bordering on parody, Desrosiers’s approach contradicts the traditional notion of commemorative monuments, in which the subject is made to be larger than life: at the 1990 Symposium international de Laval, for example, he exhibited a pedestaled statue of teddy bears standing on their heads. He is a grant holder of the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles and has considerable experience as a conference speaker and art teacher. His exhibitions have been held at various locations, including Galerie Tamaris in Montreal, the Musée de Lachine and the art gallery of Cégep Montmorency in Laval. In 1993, he presented Tu ne fuiras point (“thou shalt not flee”) at Montreal’s Galerie B-312. The installation included a papier mâché kouros wearing tattoos, a teddy bear with the added attribute of an erect male organ, and Lego figurines arranged in sexually explicit positions.
SEE:
« Pierre Desrosiers : Jouer entre l’art et la vie » by Michel Paradis, ESPACE #28, p. 31.
« L’oeuvre et son modèle » by Serge Fisette, ESPACE #36, p. 38.
