Les passeuses
David Thorpe
David Thorpe was born in 1972 in the United Kingdom and moved to Treignac, France, in 2023 to begin a collaboration with Treignac Projet. An artist with a sustained international presence, he has exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, developing a practice spanning drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation. Based in Berlin for over a decade, where he worked with several galleries, his work has evolved through shifting artistic frameworks in a continuous process of transformation. Since relocating to Treignac, he has developed an ambitious, ongoing zero-budget film project based on collaboration, mutual support, and shared production, of which the exhibition at Les Bains-Douches forms a stage.
His work is grounded in ideas of autonomy, intellectual focus, and independence, and constructs an imaginary cosmos governed by its own internal logic. Through drawing, sculpture, and installation, he develops utopian spaces and architectural structures in which construction and deconstruction coexist. Geometrical and ornamental forms are central to his practice, functioning beyond decoration as vehicles for meaning within an ongoing process of transformation.
David Thorpe is represented by Casey Kaplan (New York) and works with Maureen Paley (London), Meyer Riegger (Berlin), and Pedro Cera (Lisbon). He has held numerous institutional solo exhibitions, including at Tate Britain and Camden Arts Centre (London), Museum Kurhaus Kleve (Germany), and Kunsthaus Glarus (Switzerland), and has participated in international group exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut), Museum of Contemporary Art (California), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (California), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Tate St Ives, and Whitechapel Gallery (London). He holds an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London.