Jean-Luc Mylayne

Amiens, France, 1946 -

BiographyJean-Luc Mylayne was born in Amiens, France in 1946. He has had major solo exhibitions at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne; the Photographers’ Gallery, London; the ARC/Muse d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida.

Though he began working in 1976, Mylayne has created no more than 150 photographs, and each is unique. His photographs are the result of a trusting communal existence between artist and subject, often taking weeks or months to produce just one image. It is through this lengthly commitment to his subject that he is able to ‘script’ every aspect of the scene; the bird, Mylayne explains, becomes the ‘actor’ and he becomes the ‘director.’

In his large-scale color photographs, Jean-Luc Mylayne, along with his partner and collaborator, Mylène, meditates on the convergence of art and ornithology. Having abandoned the conveniences of home, car, and material ownership in pursuit of a nomadic life devoted to his art practice, Mylayne photographs birds in their natural environs. His ongoing project is bound in the intense intersection of observation, time, place, and natural history.

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