Grégory Sugnaux lives and works in Fribourg. His work is generally concerned with the status of the image through the mediation of exhibition and painting. In extracting the familiar image from its existing pictorial codes, he rejects hierarchical values in art history and tries to turn attention to the representation of alternative systems in image-making.
With curation alongside his artistic practice, Sugnaux investigates the conditions of the exhibition in his varying approaches. From 2016 to 2020, he was co-curator of the project space WallRiss in Fribourg and since 2017 co-curator of Backslash Festival in Zürich. For several years, Grégory Sugnaux has been exploring global visual cultures and their iconography, which he processes in thematic series. His research is based on archives of images and materials that include media such as art historical book illustration, photography, video, videogames, and comics, which are in constant growth and are each reordered in iconographic cross-sections and lines of development. For example, he recently produced a series of images dedicated to the pictorial form of the grotesque, in which he processed the famous Mannerist entrance portal of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, placing it in line with more recent phenomena of the grotesque. His present project, entitled Shape-shifting: Transfiguring Art History, focus on the visual discourse of art history and thus pursue the legacy of Aby Warburg’s iconology. For this purpose, the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s library and phototheque offer an extraordinarily rich fund. Grégory Sugnaux’s artistic methods of image analysis through image processing thus offer productive interfaces with the research foci of art history department.