David Zeller

Born in 1976 in Mulhouse, this self-taught sculptor has been refining his practice since the age of twelve, working with various materials. As a child on the beach, he discovered the potential of sand; more mature, living in the Antilles, it is harnessed to the tradition of wood. Since 2010, the full-time artist has embarked on the exploration of his favorite material: acrylic glass. His first woodcarvings, instinctively made without preliminary work while he was living in Guadeloupe, depict dozens of bodies or faces, often very expressive. Inspired sometimes classic, sometimes ethnic, his works are adorned with the noble character of wood: smooth and polished, they stimulate both sight and touch. Zed, “guided by his feelings”, tries through his art to capture the multiplicity of human behaviors: he tries to capture “Man, and more precisely his acts and attitudes (…) his interactions with life.” Gradually, he frees himself from tradition and deepens his work: in search of a universal, the essence of movement, he decides to deprive his face sculptures, to free them from a realistic aesthetic which he describes of “parasite”. He then conceived his most famous work, the Flexo: a neutral character, with a unique silhouette, wanting to support his research on attitudes and movement. Zed believes that "it is possible to transcribe all emotions, to say everything, just through gestures". Through its varied postures, the Flexo embodies its desire to capture the multiple, the gesture in its fluidity: "In turn in love, contemplative, daring or insolent, each Flexo is a reflection of us". Impossible to mold industrially, each of its “cool”, “audacious”, “active”, “desperate” attitudes of Flexo is acquired by thermoforming by hand.