List of products by brand Leo Dorfner
Léo Dorfner, born in Paris in 1985, lives and works in Paris
Art Director of Branded Magazine
EDUCATION
2006-2011
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris (atelier Djamel Tatah)
École Régionale des Beaux-arts, Caen.
SOLO SHOWS
2024
My head was feeling scared but my heart was fealing free, Les jardiniers de Montrouge, Montrouge
Home is a place where I can have a negroni, Galerie Claire Gastaud, Paris
Random Access Memories, Galerie du Montparnasse, Drawing House, Paris
2022
Drawing Now, stand de la Galerie Claire Gastaud
2021
We’re living in a social network, Galerie Claire Gastaud, Paris
2020
All is dream, Galerie Claire Gastaud, Clermont-Ferrand
2019
Léo Dorfner, Galerie Aurélien Jeauneau, St-Ouen
2018
Where do the rockets find planets ?, Galeria Victor Lope, Barcelona
Léo Dorfner, Galerie Cédric Bacqueville, Lille
Stories from the city, Galerie L’Oeil Histrion, Caen
2016
Chercher / Détruire, Galerie Anouk Le Bourdiec, Paris
2014
Vivre dans la peur - Rock’n’roll Runaways, Galerie Anouk Le Bourdiec, Paris
2011
Ecce homo festivus, Galerie Habib & Habib, Paris
2010
Galerie Art:ig, Munich
2008
Centre Culturel Villiers-Fossard, St Lô
2007
Galerie Philos Hippos, Caen
GROUP SHOWS (SELECTION)
2024
Le jardin des délices, Galerie Claire Gastaud, Paris
2023
Swab Art Fair, Galeria Victor Lope, Barcelone
Figurer l'absence, Galerie Provost-Hacker, Lille
Vestiges du Futur, Narbo Via, Narbonne
Mirages, Galerie Claire Gastaud, Clermont-Ferrand
2022
Familly and friends, Galerie Backslah, Paris
Les heures grises, Galerie Ségolène Brossette, Paris
Nuée, Musée d'Art Roger-Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand
2019
Déjà-Vu, Chez Kit, Pantin
Image & Curiosités, Villa Belleville, Paris
Tout doit disparaitre, Galerie Provost-Hacker, Lille
Déjà-Vu, Chez Kit, Pantin
Image & Curiosités, Villa Belleville, Paris
Tout doit disparaitre, Galerie Provost-Hacker, Lille
2018
Estampa, Galerie Victor Lope, Madrid
Swab art fair, Galeria Victor Lope, Barcelona
Instantanée, curator Maxime Touratier, galerie de la voute, Paris
Works VI, Galerie L’Oeil Histrion, Caen
Un monde désiré / a desired world, galerie Claire Gastaud, Clermont-Ferrand
Le Beau, la Belle et la Bête, Château du Rivau, Lémeré
I am what I am, curator Julie Crenn, ici gallery, Paris
Shelves, Hangers, Desks vol 2, curator Lia Rochas Paris, Le Coeurs, Paris
Rikiki 2, curator Joël Hubaut, Galerie Satellite, Paris
Wormholes #1, curators Clément Thibault and Mathieu Weiler, Galerie Laure Roynette, Paris
2017
Sans tambour ni trompette, curator Julie Crenn, Le Parvis, Tarbes
GlobalDrawProject, ECI Cultuurfabriek, Roermond, Netherlands
The violent silence of a new beginning, Studio Khana, Cairo, Egypt
Venus Vesper, curator Marie Deparis-Yafil, L’Atelier - Espace arts plastiques, Mitry-Mory,
:-), Under construction gallery, Paris
Fantaisie, Atelier Celsius, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais
Garder le cap, curator Lia Rochas-Páris, galerie Valerie Delaunay, Paris
2016
The Velvet Underground - New York Extravaganza, Philharmonie de Paris
L’art contemporain selon Charles Perrault, curator Hyeryne Park, Paju museum, South Korea
PAN, Quartier General, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
UMAM : 70 ans, Musée des Beaux-Arts - Palais de Carnolès, Menton
Visions Portées, MAC Arteum, Châteauneuf-le-Rouge
J’ai des doutes. Est-ce que vous en avez ?, curator Julie Crenn, Galerie Claire Gastaud,
LE SEIN, DESSIN, curator Madeleine Filippi, Galerie Galerie Vivoequidem, Paris
SEULS/ENSEMBLE- LE PORTRAIT A L’OEUVRE DANS L’ART CONTEMPORAIN, Arto thèque de Caen
2015
A CORPS PERDUS #2, curator Marc Donnadieu, Galerie Gourvennec Ogor, Marseille
Who’s afraid of picture(s)? 1& 2, curator Frédéric Léglise, à cent mètres du centre du monde, Perpignan
2014
Les esthétiques d’un monde désenchanté, CAC Meymac
Quoi de neuf ? Acquisitions récentes / collection, Artothèque de Caen
2013
Art is hope, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Drawing Now/Émergence, galerie Anouk Le Bourdiec, Paris
Drawing Room, Galerie Anouk Le Bourdiec, Montpellier
2012
Ils étaient, ils sont, ils seront, Galerie Anouk Le Bourdiec, Paris
2011
Don’t be cruel, Galerie Vanessa Quang, Paris
CURATORIAL PROJECTS
2015 Ça ira mieux demain, galerie Anouk le Bourdiec, Paris
COLLECTIONS
Artothèque de Caen
Nouveaux collectionneurs
Clermont Auvergne Métropole
Les Dominicaines, Pont-l'Evêque
Léo Dorfner: Stories from the City
Because, through sheer proliferation, images today have lost their roughness—becoming as smooth as the virtual spaces through which they circulate—Léo Dorfner offers a punk reading that disrupts overly sanitized interpretations. His reappropriation of media representations, advertising icons, fragments of everyday life, and visual memes sketches out a rock mythology of the contemporary world that is as skeptical as it is unruly. Through borrowing and quotation, through arrangement, collage, and marking, he gives shape to fragmented narratives—often absurd and anachronistic—in which PJ Harvey comments on art history, Greek statues speak about social debates, and magazine pin-ups proudly display their tattoos. Though they carry real critical potential, these shifts never sacrifice the aesthetic appeal of drawing. Despite the impertinence of his subjects, his work reveals an undeniably poetic dimension, grounded in a taste for graphic experimentation and careful composition, at the heart of a visual interplay between the texture of paper, the quality of line, the nuance of color, and the captions that may accompany them. The urban stories he invites us into thus reveal both the striking irreverence of his gaze and the capacity of layered images to produce meaning, against all logic.
In his most recent works, the artist isolates and intuitively combines fragments of images found online, forming the basis of a minimal narrative open to the viewer’s free interpretation. The cuts made within digital flows redirect the viewer’s attention, staging on paper seemingly incongruous associations of ideas. A wounded woman applying makeup, or a declaration of self-love mirrored by a tear of sadness, are enough to construct a bittersweet reading of the original images, where visual pleasure is troubled by a sense of disillusionment. The use of captions (rock lyrics or popular expressions) reinforces this iconoclastic intent by creating dissonances that invite ironic treatment. For him, humor remains the best remedy for the era’s latent pessimism. His seemingly naïve injunctions toward positive psychology (calls to pleasure on floral posters) thus advocate an ambiguous hedonism, with Léo Dorfner asserting that all (aesthetic) enjoyment always comes at the price of a certain degree of chaos.
Despite the references in his work to alternative and countercultural movements, Léo Dorfner never adopts a nihilistic stance toward art. It is not a matter of rejecting beauty—quite the opposite—but of proposing a re-evaluation of its standards, outside any academic framework. The tattoos on photographs, a signature element of his practice, stem from a fundamentally vandalistic gesture, through which the artist appropriates and defaces the bodies of magazine pin-ups or sacred icons, as if to clothe them in new ornaments. This epidermal defacement—saturating bodies with motifs of beer mugs, insults, diamonds, or skulls, all visual codes of rock culture—seems to herald the twilight of old glamour idols in favor of a less conventional aesthetic order. More melancholic yet no less subversive, his watercolor reproductions of ancient statuary dethrone heroes, returning them to a certain irreverence—like the bust of an angry sage or the consul Crassus reduced to his greed. Paired with blunt, direct quotations, these august faces lose their quality as serene relics and instead take on a more troubled present, tinged with nostalgia. In his paintings, Léo Dorfner celebrates an ancient ephebe with marble skin or seeks to rescue Theseus from the armchair of oblivion. Between the punk temptation of “no future” and the risk of tabula rasa in contemporary art, Léo Dorfner ultimately advocates for a truly anarchic economy of images, freed from both hierarchies of value and chronological order.
Florian Gaité
