Guillaume Bresson - Paintings

Monography published for the exhibition Guillaume Bresson, presented at the Palace of Versailles (21 January - 25 May 2025).

Guillaume Bresson creates hyperrealist paintings featuring characters involved in street fights that reference religious and history painting.

Guillaume Bresson was born in Toulouse in 1982 and trained at the Paris School of Fine Art. After living in Paris and Berlin, he has now settled in New York and is known for his unapologetically contemporary scenes. 

By revisiting a style of representation with its roots in classical painting that had been neglected until the early 21st century, Guillaume Bresson creates a new form of contemporary history painting by applying this genre of reconstruction of reality to his own times. As both a painter and director, he embeds his work in the present by linking his creations to topical social issues.

He came to the attention of the public with Dynasty, an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris held in 2010 - the year in which he also received the Sciences-Po Prize for Contemporary Art. Having participated in 2016-2017 in the Residency Unlimited programme, he currently lives in New York after a residency at the FLAX Foundation in Los Angeles in 2020.
 
Bresson's work has been shown in numerous international institutions such as the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (Germany, 2011), the Curitiba Biennial (Brazil, 2011), the Perm Museum (Russia, 2012), l'Institut du Monde arabe (Paris, 2015), la Collection Lambert in Avignon (France, 2015), the ArtSpace Boan in Seoul (South Korea, 2016), the Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard (France, 2018), Domaine Pommery (Reims, 2018), the French Institute Alliance française (New York, 2019), the Centre Pompidou (in a group show Dust, The Plates of Present, 2020).