Description
Biography :
Born in 1926, in Tunisia, of French parents, he lived there throughout his childhood. As a teenager, he left his homeland to go to sea aboard a cargo ship. He spent most of his youth there and learned the hard work of welding, drawing inspiration from the many places and landscapes he encountered. He was brought to work at the Ministry of the Navy in Paris in the 1950s. He left his post to devote himself to this material that he had learned to love, metal and particularly stainless steel. At the end of the 1950s, he met many artists who exploited this material, preferring it to others for its malleability and its almost eternal resistance. Determined to study the limits of steel in an artistic dimension, René Broissand continues to create. He participated in his first exhibitions in Paris from 1963 with metal artists such as César, Hiquilly, Guzman or Albert Féraud. From Basel to New York, he continues his exhibitions over twenty years. His career has been built around the intimate relationships he has maintained with many fortunes and personalities. Appreciated for his sculpture and his furniture, he is brought by this fabulous international notebook composed of the world of television, cinema and politics, to produce important orders.
His polished bronze lamps, steel tables and seats, first presented at the Saint Angello gallery, were purchased by the Rothschild Foundation in 1976. In 1977, the designer produced several sculptures for Pierre Cardin and a set of tables combining steel and ceramics, which he knew how to handle with the same passion.
His sculpture is characterized by a recurring theme, “the bird”, a symbol of the freedom he never ceased to seek. On the other hand, its furniture, charged with the same strength and the same eclecticism, revisits modernity. totem seats resulting from strong geometric research, a bench with a backrest punctuated by the rustling of steel, each piece by René Broissand is unique and manifests with its own asset the union of art and design. it is in Annecy that since 1970, a large part of his works and commissions have been created, you can see all around the lake his pieces springing from the water with dynamism and poetry. He will meet there, Bernard Accoyer, then President of the National Assembly. With the assistance of the Ministry of Culture, the latter will make him in 2009 Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. At the end of this complete career, René Broissand, never stopped creating and imagining with a sure and spontaneous gesture, living pieces composed of a material considered inert.