Patrick Faigenbaum was born in Paris (France) in 1954 where he lives and works.
Patrick Faigenbaum is a major artist on the contemporary photographic scene. His works are hold by the most prestigious public and private collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (USA), the MNAM - Centre Pompidou in Paris (France), or the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand in Paris (France).
Patrick Faigenbaum has had important solo exhibitions such as in 2017, Barcelona Besòs View in La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (Barcelona, Spain) ; in 2015, the traveling exhibition Kolkata/Calcutta, at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson (Paris, France), at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris, France) and at the Aperture Fondation (New York, USA) ; in 2014 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry (France) ; in 2013, the traveling exhibition Patrick Faigenbaum at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada) and at the Académie de France at the Villa Medici (Rome, Italy) ; in 2012, Paris - Proche et Lointain at the Musée de la Vie Romantique (Paris, France) and Noir et Blanc - 1973-2008 at the Point du Jour (Cherbourg-en- Cotentin, France) ; in 2008, at the Kunstmuseum de Bochum (Germany), at the Mishkan Le'Omanut - Museum of Art (Ein Harod, Israel), at the Musée de Grenoble (France) and at the Artothèque de Caen (France) ; in 2005 at the Musée du Louvre (Paris, France) ; in 1989, the traveling exhibition Tableaux romains, at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nîmes (France), at La Garenne Lemot (Clisson, France) and at the DRAC de Nantes (France) and also Vies parallèles at the Musée départemental de Rochechouart (Rochechouart, France) ; in 1988, the traveling exhibition Roman Portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA) and at the Museum of Art (Dallas, USA) ; in 1984, at the MNAM - Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France).
His work has been showcased in major exhibitions held in prestigious institutions like in 2019 at the Collection Lambert (Avignon, France) ; in 2018, at the CAFA Art Museum (Beijing, China) ; in 2015 at the Institut d'Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne (France) ; in 2013 at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de la ville de Cognac (France) ; in 2001 at the Palais des Beaux- Arts de Bruxelles (Belgique) ; in 2008, at the MACBA (Barcelona, Spain) ; in 1986, at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France).
Patrick Faigenbaum has been represented by la Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, since 2008.
Trained as a painter, Patrick Faigenbaum took his first photographs during the 1970s. He has since focused particularly on portraiture, which has become his speciality and allowed him to make a series of black-and-white portraits of important aristocratic families in Italy in the early 1980s. When he takes up other types of project, he tackles places unknown to him, offering a fixed and intimate look on a city and its identity, as seen in his works on Bremen, Barcelona, Prague, Santulussurgiu and Calcutta. Then, Faigenbaum's work has evolved from intimate portraiture to more enigmatic meditations on the role of the indivual amid the depthless intricacies of history, social structure, and spiritual experience.
Nourished by art history and mainly painting, Patrick Faigenbaum specialized in a photography that has nothing to envy to the pictorial nobility: the position of the models, the light, the texture, the grain, the construction, framing and colors... everything is elaborated on like a painting. Specialized in portraiture, he became interested in family issues, genealogy and attachment to habitats from the time he entered the Villa Medici in Rome in 1987. He then produced in black and white, in atmospheres steeped in history, portraits of the great Italian families in their unchanging secular splendor. Since then, his photographs have gone into color and have not stopped questioning individuals and their relationship to the world, their place of residence, their history... therefore their identities. Besides the intimate point of view and the portrait, he visits all the other pictorial genres: still life, vanity, landscape...