Benjamin Vautier (1935-2024), known as Ben, is a French artist of Swiss origin.
He acquired fame among the public at the end of the 1960s, in particular through his “writings” available in various media and forms.
It was thanks to his second-hand record store, whose facade he decorated, that he met César, Martial Raysse, Arman and Yves Klein.
Part of the Post-Modern artistic avant-garde, Ben is one of the main founders of the Fluxus group.
Ben is an artist known for his performances and installations.
He enjoys incredible popularity thanks to his “writings” which combine imrelevance and accuracy of speech.
Ben “signs everything”, he says, going along the lines of the Fluxus movement and its anti-art, laughing and experiencing creation as a subversive attitude on a daily basis. Very quickly, from the age of twenty, he invented good words, wrote them down, kept them... Decorating Quo Vadis diaries (“I write therefore I am”, “today I take my time”, “one day after the other”), these falsely naive micro-reflections, which made the reader laugh or plunge the reader into an abyss of perplexity, would make him famous.
The artist has brought into his work worlds as far removed from the artistic field as the ego or the truth.
In the 1980s, he was at the origin of the name given to the group formed around Robert Combas and Hervé Di Rosa “Figuration Libre”.
Ben's works are present in the world's largest private and public collections, including MoMA in New York, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, the M.A.C. in Nice, the M.A.C. in Marseille and the M.A.C. in Lyon.

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“art must be new and shock”
Ben.