Stéphane Ducret (Swiss, 1970) studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel in Geneva spending extensive periods of time in New York, Buenos Aires and Porto. He currently lives and works in Geneva. After going through a long creative crisis, in 2017 he renewed his artistic practice and the formulation of the current series entitled REAL ESTATE began whereby he started to appropriate and recompose contemporary masterpieces by placing them, disconnected from their original context, in imaginary stagings in which he creates new narratives.

To date, the REAL ESTATE series is composed of 10 paintings on canvas, all measuring 208 x 188 cm (82 x 74 in.), and whose titles quote the names of the authors of the ‘borrowed’ works along with the hashtag symbol, as if they were notifications on social media. As for the title of the series, it refers to real estate but also to the ‘Estate of the Artist’ a term universally used by the art world to designate the heritage of the artist.

While questioning the relationship between reality and imagination, between knowledge and recognition, Ducret explores the role and status of the artist as well as his relationship to the art market. By embodying the audience, the collector and the art maker at the same time, he sets himself into a kind of multi-sided imaginary dialogue in which he takes up and develops the discourse of the artists he subjects. The selection of these ‘subjects’ corresponds to a perfectly assumed strategic reflection in which meanings and questions intertwine and confront each other both in content and in terms of formal research.