In the studio of… Michel de Broin | Create in a fog

It was time to visit Michel de Broin’s bustling studio. The Montreal sculptor has had a busy pandemic period. With public art projects in Montreal and Bromont as well as in Germany, Korea and Great Britain. And then, this genius of art who marvelously combines aestheticism, awareness, style and technical gaze became a dad!

Eric Clement
The Press

The workshop

On entering the studio, one sees, against a wall, Threshold, made with a door from an old Montreal metro car associated with an electronic system. Michel de Broin programmed it to open at the same time as when it was working. In front of the work, we noticed that “the metro” was on the green line, between LaSalle and Charlevoix! A ghostly presence that animates this workshop where you can find a multitude of works, models, photographs and project plans.

By visiting the place arranged on three floors, one had the impression that Michel de Broin had reached a new dimension, still architectural and harmonious but less technological. “Technical works are like babies, they’re fragile and you always have to take care of them! he says.

Big year 2021

The year 2021 will have been intense for Michel de Broin. First, he became the father of a little girl. It changes a life! And then the pandemic gave him time to create. Last summer, he had a floating sculpture installed, Treasure, in the Silbersee, a lake in Germany. An order obtained thanks to his fame and the contacts made in Europe when he lived in Paris, then in Berlin between 2005 and 2011.

Unable to travel to Germany, he had requested that a sample of sand from the lake be sent to him. “I translated the geometry of a grain of sand into a solid composed of mirror planes assembled to form a monolith and designed to float like an ice cube,” says the 51-year-old artist. The work deals with the relationship between the new recreational use of the site and the old one, the exploitation of a sand quarry.

The Montreal Digital Art Biennale also gave him the opportunity, in 2021, to show, for the first time in the metropolis, his assembly line that creates sand castles. His most complex work, the sand being difficult to tame. “A sophisticated piece of work for building sand castles that children would do much better! laughs Michel de Broin.

public art

The decrease in exhibitions in 2020-2021 led Michel de Broin to focus on public art. An activity that has often allowed him to shine with flagship works such as Dendrites, at the entrance to Montreal. Even if the contests are complex and frustrating when you lose, he finds pleasure in them. “For it to work, you have to want the site, the context and the architecture, so be selective in the projects,” he says.

Last year he planted his Sporophores in Pierre-Dansereau Park in Outremont. Thirteen large bronze sculptures, in continuity with his works exhibited at Division in 2018. They seem to emerge from an underground mycelium, like mushrooms, with shapes evoking human tenderness with a technical side. One of his favorite works.

“I tried to do something that I thought was beautiful, like pipes that would be in love, but that’s subjective,” he says. They also have a monstrous character. Recently I was in the park. A grandmother was with a 12 year old child. She told him that she didn’t understand what these “things” were! The little boy replied that he loved them! »

At the end of December, he installed Bestiary in Bromont. A bronze perched on a rock that brings together the limbs of deer and horses, “to form a knot at the crossroads” and evoke the resistance of animals. In 2021, he also created a suspended work for the new entrance to Collège Gérald-Godin in Montreal. A sort of classroom made up of 60 chairs that makes one think of a cell or a united group. “Like a utopian classroom, without hierarchy, a dynamic assembly of all the components of the class, and which protects,” he says.

Projects abroad

Michel de Broin is currently working on two orders from abroad. For South Korea, where he already has a work of public art, he is preparing Stellationa sculpture inspired by majestic, located in the gardens of the National Gallery of Canada. It will be a steel structure made of large classic streetlights. It will be installed near six buildings in Gocheok IPARK, Seoul.

Finally, he will insert two works in the square created during the redevelopment of the Victorian warehouses of Coal Drops Yard, near King’s Cross station, in London. The commissioner who invited him liked Dendrites. The artist is at the stage of concept and proposals. “It’s very exciting because this shopping district, with fashion and design, is really, really cool,” he says.

Michel de Broin “continues his way in the fog”, he who has always been able to draw on what came to his mind. Public art has somewhat taken over its output for galleries lately. “But it’s so interesting to do great projects in the public space,” he says. It’s a great privilege rather than creating a work that goes into a private collection. »

“I don’t have a program established in advance, he adds, but when a project appears, it carries me and I then encounter a host of challenges. Their resolution activates me. When things are going too well, I get super anxious. I am at my best when things are going badly and problems need to be solved. But there, I can’t wait for the end of the pandemic to have assistants in the workshop… It helps! »

Selected works