GRANCHER Valéry
biography /
Grancher is best known for selling Internet art in the contemporary art mainstream. In 1999, Grancher had a solo exhibit in a contemporary art museum in the United States, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. Editions du Seuil at the time, published a book about him which was sold at the Pacific Film Archive[citation needed]. Grancher’s art is a mix of conceptual and pop art references, sometimes with a sense of humour, sometimes appropriating the fads of the day. When Grancher started in the art world in 1995, he used emails in his art to show the processes and exchanges of the Internet community (email art) in physical installations like ‘Alone’ (1995). In 1997 he used webcams in his project ‘webscape’, which dealt with the concept of “cybertime.” In 1998, Grancher experimented with pop art in his ‘webpaintings’ project. In 2002, as Google began to dominate the Internet, he launched the “Search Art” collaborative project by creating a piece called ‘Self Portrait.’ Google had become a buzz word in the art world. In 2005 he exhibited and sold at FIAC, the international art fair in Paris, ‘the biggest Google paintings never (sic) produced.’