Keyword Famous Painter

Chinese-Australian Artist Jiawei Shen has a plan. His wife Lan Wang says it is crazy. But nothing can stop him on his obsessive mission to create a monumental 130 square metre painting of the turbulent history of Communism. Jiawei’s 10-year deep dive into the bloody history of revolution is counterpointed by a profoundly intimate portrait of his marriage to artist wife Lan, forged in the chaos of Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution. With hundreds of portraits and remixes of iconic artworks, can Jiawei complete his epic Tower of Babel masterpiece while facing the considerable risks of revealing it to the world?

Few artist portraits give us the privilege of getting as close to the painter as if we had free access to his studio. Over a period of three years, Pepe Danquart got to accompany the painter Daniel Richter, watching him paint, negotiate with his gallerist, talk to his publisher and joke with fellow artist Jonathan Meese. Danquart interviews collectors, attends auctions and even visits record shops.

The life and work of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat have been marked by a long quest for identity, by his Haitian and Puerto Rican family origins and by a founding trip to Africa. To portray this major painter of the 20th century, who died in 1988 at only 27 years old, is also to evoke the place of black American artists in the conservative and racist America of the Reagan years.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Matisse's birth and of the exhibition at the Center Pompidou which will be dedicated to him in 2020, this art documentary brings us back to life of the journeys made by Matisse that influenced his art. And particularly his last trip to Polynesia in 1930 which will bring him to the threshold of contemporary art with the invention of his gouache cut-out papers.