BEN (VAUTIER, BENJAMIN)

* 18.7.1935 Naples, † 5.6.2024 Nice City

The Franco-Swiss artist Benjamin Vautier, known to many simply as ‘Ben’ for short, was born in Naples on 18 July 1935. From the late 1950s, Ben was on the scene as an artist, performer, organiser, language innovator and creative reinventor of art. With his numerous interventions, he became a key figure in the Fluxus movement in Europe in the 1960s. Inspired by Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp and the ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’, Vautier, who has lived in Nice since 1949, developed an unmistakable personal artistic style based on the Dada movement. His text-based paintings, with their short, pithy sentences, which question and challenge life in equal measure, are particularly popular. Exhibitions at home and abroad, as well as numerous retrospectives, bear witness to Ben Vautier's artistic success.