«Raymond Hains was a French Conceptual artist best known for his décollages made from weathered French posters. Opposed to the heroic existentialism championed by Abstract Expressionism, Hains found meaning from vernacular objects and images. “The picture should not be considered as a world in itself, but the world itself should be seen as a picture,” he once said. Born on November 9, 1926 in St-Brieuc, France, he studied sculpture at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, before transitioning to photography after discovering a book entitled Photographie Française 1839-1936 in 1944. It was his apprenticeship to Emmanuel Souguez, and Souguez’s use of photomontage, that inspired the artist to create his first photograms, including LES ROBOTS, ST-BRIEUC (1947). In 1960, he helped to found the Nouveau Réalisme movement, along with the artists Yves Klein, Jacques Villeglé, François Dufrêne, and Jean Tinguely. Over the course of his career, he vacillated between found-object installations, sculpture, décollage, and photography. Hains died on October 28, 2005, in Paris, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.»

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