Herve Di Rosa

Hervé Di Rosa was born in Sète, on the French Mediterranean coast, in 1959, and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He began selling paintings in 1979, at twenty. Two years later he was one of eight young painters in an exhibition assembled by the critic Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, and with Robert Combas, Rémi Blanchard and François Boisrond he founded Figuration Libre — a movement that set itself against the theoretical seriousness of the French art establishment with something closer to the energy of punk. He lives and works between Sète, Paris and Lisbon.

The early paintings are crowded, high-colour and deliberately unrefined: monsters, cartoon figures, hand-drawn borders, comics and advertising absorbed without irony or apology. Di Rosa has never treated the vocabulary of popular imagery as raw material to be elevated. It is simply the language he thinks in, and the paintings assume a viewer who reads it fluently. The line is emphatic, the palette unmixed, and the surfaces are packed to the edges.

From 1993 the practice changed shape. Under the title Autour du Monde, Di Rosa began working in a different country every year or two — Bulgaria, Ghana, Benin, Vietnam, Mexico, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Tunisia, Israel, South Africa, Cuba and others — collaborating with local craftsmen and adopting whatever technique that place had perfected: lacquer, sign painting, embroidery, glass, enamel, wood carving, sequins. The works that came back are not depictions of those places but objects made in them, jointly, and the project has now run for three decades. It is the central argument of his career: that the hierarchy separating art from craft, and Western art from everything else, does not survive contact with the workshops themselves.

That argument became an institution in 2000, when he founded the Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sète — a museum devoted to what he calls modest art, the mass-produced, vernacular and overlooked objects that circulate below the notice of art history. MIAM has since become a significant venue in its own right, and the term has entered French critical usage.

Di Rosa was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2022. His work has been the subject of Le Passe-Mondes at the Centre Pompidou in 2024 and Un air de famille at the Mucem in Marseille in 2025, and he has shown with Templon in Paris and Brussels. His paintings are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the CAPC in Bordeaux, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Bass in Miami Beach and the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen.

SELECTED CV

Born 1959, Sète, France

Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal

Education and Training

École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2020 Hervé Di Rosa, Art to Be Gallery, Art Paris Art Fair, Paris, France

2018 Belgium Dreams, Galerie Huberty & Breyne, Brussels, Belgium

2018 Images et peintures, Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Paris, France

2017 Hervé Di Rosa à la Viuva Lamego, Portugal 2014–2017, Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Paris, France

2017 Classic Museum & Collections, AD Galerie, Montpellier, France

2017 Théâtre d’ombres, Espace Jacques Villeglé, Saint-Gratien, France

2013 Autour du monde, 17e étape: Paris Nord, Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Paris, France

2009 Les Robots du Noun, Centre culturel Aragon, Oyonnax, France

2007 Miami Landscape, Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Paris, France

2006 Retour à Tunis, Institut français, Tunis, Tunisia

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2025 Hervé Di Rosa, Mucem, Marseille, France (solo)

2024 Hervé Di Rosa, le passe-mondes, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, France (solo)

2023 Traverser la nuit: Collection Antoine de Galbert, Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal

2022 Hervé Di Rosa: ses sources, ses démons, Musée de Valence, art et archéologie, Valence, France (solo)

2022 Micro-Mondes, Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, France

2022 Serpent cosmique, Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse, Lille, France

2022 En mémoire du merveilleux, Musée Paul Valéry, Sète, France

2019 Les Trésors d’Hervé Di Rosa, Centre d’art LaBanque, Béthune, France (solo)

2018 Hervé Di Rosa: l’œuvre au monde, La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent, Roubaix, France (solo)

2014 Modestes Tropiques, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France (solo)

2013 Plus jamais seul: Hervé Di Rosa et les arts modestes, La Maison Rouge, Paris, France (solo)

2007 Tout l’œuvre peint, Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne, France (solo)

2002 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico (solo)

1997 Musée de l’Objet, Blois, France (solo)

1984 5/5: Figuration Libre France / USA, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France

Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs

2000 5e Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon: Partage d’exotismes, Lyon, France

1985 13e Biennale de Paris, Paris, France

Awards, Honours and Residencies

2022 Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, painting section, Paris, France (installed June 2024)

1983 Prix de la Fondation Médicis; two-year residency in New York, NY, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2000 Founder, with Bernard Belluc, of the Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM), Sète, France

Autour du monde, Ongoing project realised with craft workshops in Bulgaria, Portugal, Ghana, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Mexico, Tunisia, the United States and Spain

Permanent installation, Salle des Actes, Musée de l’Institut Pasteur, Paris, France

2020 Twenty-two screenprints commissioned by the Région Occitanie, Toulouse, France

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, France

Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sète, France