Pierre Sabatier, Sculptor

The sculptor Pierre Sabatier (1925-2003) devoted most of his career to building a monumental and collective form of art, on the fringes of any commercial circuit. Trained after the war at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, then at the Beaux-Arts of Paris, he creates mosaics and ceramics before turning, at the end of the 1950s, towards metal, which became his material of predilection.

In 1966 he joined the movement “The Living Wall", which campaigned for the integration of the arts into architecture, collaborating with such renowned architects as Maurice Novarina, the Arsène-Henry brothers, Michel Herbert, Robert Auzelle, Henry Pottier, Pierre Dufau and Daniel Badani.

The expressiveness and monumentality of his works (sculptures, sculpted walls and spaces, clerestories, doors) breathe lyricism and character into modern buildings (office and residential blocks, universities, town halls, company headquarters, churches).

In the 1980s, Pierre Sabatier surprised the arts world by creating fantastic sets from sprayed concrete in the tradition of grotesques and imaginary architecture, to be installed in amusement parks.

He also continued to speak through metal in vast construction programs, notably in La Défense, in collaboration with the architects Jean-Paul Viguier, Berthet-Pochy or Franck Hammoutène.

Pierre Sabatier produced abundant work in France and abroad. In 1974 he received the bronze medal for plastic arts from the Academy of Architecture, and in 1976 the silver medal; he then was named knight of the Legion d'Honneur in 2002. The model of the Rochas facade in Paris (1974), one of his most emblematic creations, is in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art-Centre Pompidou.

• Size: 24 x 28 cm
• 216 pages
• 300 color and black & white illustrations
• Paperback with flaps
• ISBN: 978-2-9155-4243-1

Text in French only