Ben Vautier dies: the artist committed suicide a few hours after the death of his wife

Mourning in the art world. The French artist of the Fluxus movement, Ben Vautierdied by suicide at the age of 88, less than a day after his wife died from a stroke. Vautier, known simply by his stage name Ben, was found lifeless in his home in Nice. The prosecutor’s office stated that his body was found with a gunshot wound and that he will open an investigation to determine the cause of death.

The artist with his paintings and his humorous performances he imploded the divide between life and art, earning laughter and admiration from critics. Ben, along with other artists associated with the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, set out to blur the boundaries between the everyday and the sacred field of artistic creation. He succeeded, creating works that sometimes incorporated the detritus of life itselfhelping to steer art in a new direction in an age when high abstract painting was still preferred by the establishment.

He is remembered for one aphorism in particular: “Everything is art”, a phrase he wrote in painting over and over again, with many different variations, over the course of his six-decade career. However, he also loved to create paradoxes and sometimes intentionally contradicted himself in other works and writings.

Born in Naples on 18 July 1935 (his great-grandfather was the Swiss painter Benjamin Vautier), after traveling to Turkey, Egypt and Greece, Ben Vautier settled in 1949. Fascinated by surrealism, the use of every artistic tool as a disruptive and sometimes shocking means of communication, he was profoundly influenced by the work of Marcel Duchamp. The Seventies were those of his great success and his profound social commitment, participating in Documenta in Kassel and holding exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York. In 1978 he founded the La Différence gallery in Nice, which is also the name of his magazine, in which he established himself as a defender of ethnic minorities.