Secondary Market
Yann Houri
French, born 1990
Yann Houri (born Paris, 1990) is a self-taught French painter whose heavily built-up acrylic surfaces sit between abstraction and figuration. His early Inside Identity series explores emotion and selfhood in a hyper-connected age through bursts of colour set against black and white.
Biography
Yann Houri was born in Paris in 1990 and is self-taught. He lives and works in Paris, where he paints, sculpts and occasionally performs.
Sculpting with paint
Houri applies acrylic in thick, heavily worked layers, often together with charcoal, so that his canvases carry the relief of a modelled surface. Bursts of saturated colour break through fields of black and white. His work moves between abstraction and figuration: faces and bodies surface, dissolve and re-form as the eye travels across the impasto.
Inside Identity and later series
His early series Inside Identity looks at how identity is built and fragmented in a hyper-connected age, where emotion is constantly displayed and filtered. Later bodies of work include Fragmented Movement, Mo(ve)ment and Humanature, shown at Espace Commines in Paris in 2017 with a published catalogue.
Exhibitions
In 2019 Houri made simultaneous debuts in Los Angeles, with Intuition at Joseph Gross Gallery, and in London, with Moments at Unit London in Mayfair. The same year he was included in Absolutely Abstract at the Yucca Valley Visual & Performing Arts Center in California.