Born in 1946 in Paris, Bernard Joubert lives and works in his hometown. Since the early 1970s, he has been exploring an open form of painting, built through displacement, fragmentation, and repetition. His artistic research blends canvas, wall, street, and photography into a visual language that is both radical and poetic.

He began by painting on unstretched canvases, drawing lines of color directly from the tube. In 1972, these compositions quite literally opened up to the wall, integrating the surrounding space. Starting in 1973, he launched the Rubans series, which he continued until 1981. In this body of work, he painted colored lines on cotton ribbons, outlining geometric shapes without closing them: squares, double squares, rectangles—forms left hanging, unresolved, questioning the boundaries of the image.

In 1974, his first solo exhibition took place at Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris, where he showed his Rubans. Until 1981, three more solo exhibitions there followed the evolution of this research. Bernard Joubert’s work was also supported by several European gallerists: Françoise Lambert in Milan, Albert Baronian in Brussels, Rolf Ricke in Cologne, Hal Bromm in New York. He was invited to numerous international events, including Contemporeana in Rome, the Paris Biennale, Plan & Space in Ghent, The Art of the Performance in Venice, and Europa79 in Stuttgart. The Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Étienne (1975) and Grenoble (1976) each devoted a solo exhibition to his work.

In 1974, the MoMA in New York acquired several of his drawings. That same year, his work entered the Panza di Biumo collection. Alongside his painting practice, Bernard Joubert developed a photographic approach: he documented his Rubans installed in public spaces. In 2013, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris acquired a 200 x 200 cm Carré from 1974, accompanied by a series of thirty photographs taken in Strasbourg and in private interiors. From 1976 onward, he photographed a 200 x 4.5 cm rectangle marked by a white and a black ribbon, installed in the streets of Paris, New York, Brussels, and Venice.

By 1980, touches of color began appearing at the intersections of the ribbons, initiating a formal shift that led him, in 1982, to paint on strips of canvas mounted on plexiglass. He thus continued his work of opening up the pictorial surface through superposition and chromatic expansion. Color spread out, overlapped, and asserted its autonomy—independent of its support.

In 2012–2013, he created a series based on flower photographs taken from a botanical encyclopedia. In 2019, he drew inspiration from Goya’s Caprichos to pursue this logic of image metamorphosis. Beginning in 2013, he launched the Peintures écrasées series, in which oil paint is applied to old engravings or photographs, then partially pressed under a glass plate, the whole being returned to its original frame. The resulting visual disturbance reconnects with the ambiguities of his earliest canvas experiments.

In 2020, with the Temps simultanés series, Bernard Joubert began layering works from the Rubans period with those from his more recent explorations. In doing so, he unfolds a living archive of his own practice, where the memory of forms, the stratification of gestures, and the shifting of temporalities become the site of a perpetual recomposition.

SOLO SHOWS

2023 “Le Fixe et du Variable”, Bigaignon, Paris, France
2023 ”Simultanés”, Castle of Tours, Tours, France
2017 Rencontres d'octobre, Jacqueline Boissier, Paris, France
2016 POCTB, Orléans, France
2016 ”La Pittura al limite”, Gallery Il Ponte, Florence
2015 Œuvres, 1980 1982, Gallery Alain Coulange, Paris
2014 Gallery Flichy, Paris, France
2011 Institut Français de Bonn, Bonn, Germany
2010 Gallery Alain Margaron, Paris, France
2007 ”Peintures de peintures”, Cultural space Martial Taugourdeau, Bonneval Le Colombier, Orléans, France
2005 Gallery Servandoni, Paris
2003 Gallery L’AGART, Amilly
2000 L‘art dans les chapelles, Chapel Saint-Nicodème, Guénin, France

GROUP SHOWS

2025 “Ligne(s) de mire”, off-site exhibition at the Bonisson Art Center, Bigaignon, Rognes, France
2024 Art Brussels, Bigaignon, Belgique
2021 ”L'Entretien de la Peinture”, Espace Art Absolument, Paris
2019 ”Flora Maxima”, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan
2019 ”Sillage”, Cheongju, Museum of Art, Corée du sud
2016 ”Musée, même”, DIX291, Paris
2016 ”La Materia della forma”, collection Panza di Biumo, MART, Italie
2015 ”Quand fondra la neige, où ira le blanc”, Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, Paris
2014 ”Une maison pour la peinture”, Atelier Cantoisel, Joigny
2011 ”Peintures paysage”, Galerie Alain Margaron, Paris
2010 Rencontres d’octobre, Jacqueline Boissier, Paris
2009 ”Autour du paysage”, Galerie Alain Margaron, Paris
2009 ”Histoires de crânes”, galerie DIX-291, Paris
2008 "André Cadere peinture sans fin", Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
2007 ”Surfaces de passage”, Fondation Zervos, Vézelay
2007 ”Orthodoxes- hétérodoxes : choisir sa ligne”, Centre régional d’art Contemporain, Montbéliard
2003 ”Trois!”, Carré Saint-Vincent, Scène nationale, Orléans
2000 ”Rencontres, hommage à Pierre Boissier”, Paris

COLLECTIONS 

Fondation CAB, Brussels, Belgium
Museum of Modern Art, Strasbourg, France
Museum of Modern Art, New-York, United States of America
Collection Panza di Biumo
Museum of Grenoble, France
Museum of Modern Art, Camberra, Australia
Collection Rolf Ricke
MAM of the city of Paris
Museum of Modern Art • LaM, Villeneuve d'Ascq
Peinture murale, Institut Français de Bonn, Germany