Pierre Pinoncelli, l’artiste à la phalange coupée

Since his two attacks with a hammer against Marcel Duchamp’s urinal in 1993 and again in 2006, the artist Pierre Pinoncelli is known worldwide for this iconoclastic and subversive act. Often misinterpreted by the press, this double performance, and the trials that followed it, overshadowed the rest of his work: his paintings from the 1960s, and the many powerful happenings he made. Pinoncelli sprayed André Malraux with red paint in 1969, robbed a bank to protest apartheid in 1975, and mutilated himself in 2002 to denounce FARC violence in Colombia. Often motivated by political demands, Pinoncelli went to the end of his ideas and expressed himself through often shocking gestures, which question us.