Jacques Villegle

Found objects, ripped posters, radical collages: as part of the New Realism movement of the early 1960s, Jacques Villegle's work directly influenced his contemporaries, in particular, New York Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. By using everyday objects, the New Realists sought new forms of artistic expression and called into question the role of the artist and the nature of art itself. Villegle's work with posters that he found in the streets-some ripped by anonymous passers-by or decayed by the passage of time, and some even damaged to the point of illegibility-exhibited his desire to subvert the conventional discourse of advertising and political propaganda. Since the 1960s, Villegle's work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and North America, and forms part of the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, as well as many prestigious museums and galleries around the world. Villegle was a featured artist in the 2006 exhibition "Nouveau Realisme: Art and Reality in the 1960s" at Vienna's Museum of Modern Art. "Jacques Villegle" is the first English-language book to represent this influential artist. Illustrating his career through a series of essays-a retrospective text, an interview, and over 150 images-the book spans the artist's output from his early work to his most recent projects.