Born in 1978 in Lille (France), François-Xavier Gbré is a Franco-Ivorian
photographer who lives and works between the Marais Poitevin in France and Abidjan.The photographic work of this mixed-race art-ist of Ivorian origin who grew up in the north of France apprehends
architecture, landscape and urbanity in the form of a documentary testimony that evokes the architectural photography of Lewis Baltz,
Stephen Shore and Guy Tillim. From Mali to Israel, from Lille to Rabat, François- Xavier Gbré photographs abandoned architectures bearing the traces of their country's social and political history. His photographs take a dis-tanced look at the buildings and the symbolic charge that history and historicity give them. They are inter-ested in the past, in the muted history of places, reveal the invisibilities of everyday life and petrify fragments of a world in perpetual mutation. In a soft radicality, he testifies of the in-between, of these moments of tipping revealed with force by the architecture.
François-Xavier Gbré's work can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Tate Modern (London, UK), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, USA), the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), Chazen Museum of Art—University of Wisconsin (Madison USA), Walther Collection (Ulm, Germany), Rencontres d'Arles (Arles, France), Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (Paris, France) and Musée des Confluences (Lyon, France).
In 2020, François-Xavier Gbré is the win-ner of the Louis Roederer Prize of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles.
