Trivia

French visual artist who often used neon lights in his installations. He was a friend of Ellsworth Kelly.

In 2110 he became the second living artist to create a permanent commission for the Musée du Louvre in Paris. He redesigned the bay windows and oculi of the museum's Lefuel staircase to let in more light.

He taught himself to paint as a teenager, studying art along with Russian, and working in the family business making toy model cars (which he continued to manage until 1975). After a brief period of semi-figurative painting and sculpture inspired by Oceanic art, he turned to abstraction in 1950, when he had his first solo exhibition in Paris.

In 1960, he co-founded the activist collective of kinetic and optical art Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (Grav) with Julio Le Parc and others.