Max DUCOS Rêveries d'une promeneuse solitaire. Boucles de pierre et autres images d'enfance.

From 9 March to 2 April 2022, the Les Arts Dessinés gallery is delighted to be hosting Rêveries d'une promeneuse solitaire. Boucles de pierre et autres images d'enfance - a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Max Ducos, recently awarded the Prix Landerneau for his album Mon Passage secret.

There will be 30 original illustrations on display, drawn from different albums, including Le Garçon du phare, Jeu de piste à Volubilis, L'Ange disparu, Le Mystère de la grande dune, Le Royaume de Minuit and Vert Secret, and 12 splendid illustrations from Boucles de pierre - the principal focus of the exhibition.

The son of an architect father and antiques dealer mother, Max Ducos is an artist and author and illustrator of children's books. After obtaining his baccalaureate in literature, he enrolled on a visual arts course at Bordeaux, where he studied drawing, painting and later graphics, and also learned 3D modelling and the basics of architecture.

Max graduated in 2002 and went on to enrol at the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD), where he specialised in volume and in illustration, studying notably with Laurent Corvaisier. His first images combining childhood motifs and architecture were shown in Bologna that same year.

In 2006, he published his degree project, Jeu de piste à Volubilis, which sold 100,000 copies - an early success which Max built on with L'Ange disparu (2008), Le Carnaval des dragons (2010) and, more recently, Vert Secret and Le Mystère de la Grande Dune (2014) and Fossile (2018).

Teaming up with children's writer Clémentine Beauvais, in 2021 he published Boucles de pierre, a humorous and wonderfully imaginative story that looks at everyday reality through a poetic lens.

Engaging characters are brought vividly to life through Max Ducos's gouache illustrations, and his work is littered with subtle references to the history of art, paying tribute for example to the painters Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein, the designer Charlotte Perriand and the architects Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens.

The Les Arts Dessinés gallery is thrilled to be championing such an original aesthetic and an artistic approach so thoroughly rooted in the contemporary world.

Private view: Tuesday 8 March, from 6pm to 9pm, in the presence of the artist.

Works available to view online from Wednesday 9 March 2022.