Known as a singular sculptor, major of his time, whose work is visible today in many French and foreign museums, Étienne-Martin (1913-1995) remains an artist to discover and rediscover, who continues to resist the hasty attempts of the to enclose in an established aesthetic current, which never ceases to surprise us and to enchant us by the inventiveness and the vastness of its universe.

While being of his time, but fundamentally free and independent, this unwanted dreamer of the material (wood, plaster, wire, fabrics, ropes, bronze, recovered materials, paper ...) and of the form (celestial swimmer, coat, wall-mirror, tree-look, trimmings, wire drawing, big couple ...) practiced an art that was, in the end, other and more than a sculpture: he drew, wove, knotted, tied, composed, architectured the object of his thought, of his desire, constructed by the work of the imaginary in contact with the real, sometimes going as far as the fantastic.
Thus the author of the "Demeures", eternal inhabitant of childhood, passionate of literature, and of mystical and esoteric texts, constantly sought the link between the past and the present, the origin and the memory, the man and the universe, the real and the imaginary, the "tangible" and the "intangible", the sky and the earth.

Through this quest, Etienne-Martin has opened a new horizon to the field of sculpture, beyond the distinction between traditional and modern art, trying to find a "junction", tirelessly.

Entering his work is like travelling to another time from which emanates an immemorial presence, a world where duality or division is abolished, in other words, the separated, the extremes are united, united, joined together, where art becomes another reality, not only to look, to think, but to dwell - as our understudy, as our indwelling.

Etienne-Martin's catalog