Born in 1942, Philippe Weisbecker lived in France until 1966. Graduate of Ensad, he went to Tunisia from 1966 to 1968 under the military cooperation, as a graphic designer for the Tunisian Tourism Commission. In 1968, he left for the United States, then returned in 1975 and taught at Ensad until 1979.
That year, he returned to New York permanently and worked there as an illustrator for the press and publishing (The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Village Voice, Esquire, New York Times...). Once back in Europe in 2006, he started to develop a personal work freed from commissions. Admired and widely published in Japan, well known to American readers, Philippe Weisbecker remains strangely unknown in France.
In his series of drawings, paintings and volumes, in vintage notebooks or on refurbished papers, he explores his favorite subjects: architecture, objects, clothes, vehicles... The beauty of the ordinary, the intelligence of usual shapes, are considered with a new eye and brought back to their greatest graphic simplicity.
“Tools, household utensils, hardware items, machines, factories, building materials are no longer looked at only in terms of their usefulness. They must be practical before being beautiful. And yet they exude a raw, essential beauty that I like to magnify.
When I draw a pipe, a washbasin or a screw, I try to apprehend it with the same passion I would for a landscape or a portrait, the nobility, the charm, the beauty of these ‘things’. Their place on gallery walls seems to me just as legitimate as those of more ‘noble’ subjects.
I have always been fascinated by these objects, which have become trivial after having used and reused them. They are so much a part of our daily life that we have never had the bad taste to reshape them according to fashion. It is in their simplicity and their specificity that they attract me.” Philippe Weisbecker
