Rupert Shrive walks to Tours with his Balzac

parisdiaArchitecture, Happy moments, Performing arts1 Comment

Rupert Shrive moved his gigantic Balzac from Montmartre to Musée Balzac in the XVI th by foot in 2022

Natasha Fraser Cavassoni was celebrating her birthday near the Buttes Chaumont and I was lucky to sit next to an eccentric English artist Rupert Shrive who was born in Norfolk but settled in Paris many years ago. He was commissioned to make a large head of Balzac for the Paris Balzac museum and decided to move it from his studio in Montmartre by foot. The 3,5 m high sculpture weighs 100 kgs and now that the show in Paris is over, the Musée Balzac in Château de Saché, near Tours, will exhibit it for three years. The artist decided to walk the statue there, on the Chemin de Saint Jacques, with his friend, cinematographer Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva who already filmed the Paris episode. They left Paris on Sunday March 19 th and the opening is on April 4. Their greatest enemy is the WIND. If you have a house on the way, don’t hesitate to go and say hello…

On the road, pulling Balzac!

On April 4, at 11 am, Rupert Shrive will do a performance for the public around his sculpture at Saché. I hope he will still be standing straight after walking 320 kms through the French countryside via Orléans and Blois. His hope was to be able to get on a barge from Orléans to Tours, but the water level of the Loire was not high enough apparently…

Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni celebrated her birthday in the trendy Buttes Chaumon

This artistic gesture was inspired to him by the fight against constant jet setting around the world of art collectors and block buster exhibitions. He walk through Sologne and the Loire Valley is odyssey which he compares to Don Quixote’s… To push this 100 kg statue through wind and rain is his artistic “épopée”. Trained at St Martin’s School of Art and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he has exhibited on the theme of Goya in the East Wing of the Courtauld Institute and at Grand Palais in 2011.

Rupert Shrive was born in 1965 in Norfolk

This epic adventure will become a second film by Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva. don’t hesitate’ to watch the first one here. ON Friday night they slept in Meung sur Loire… 129 more kms to go.

A collection of his paintings decorate the Minister of the British Embassy’s house in Paris.

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