Pierre Sabatier (artist)

Pierre Sabatier (20 March 1925 – 3 May 2003) was a French sculptor who throughout his career produced over 150 major and diverse works in France and internationally. Born in 1925, Pierre Sabatier grew up in the French town of Moulins where he attended primary and secondary school. After WWII, he moved to Paris where, from 1949 to 1952, he attended classes at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. For nearly fifty years, Sabatier accompanied the modern architecture movement with his dedication to building collective and monumental art. Many of his works were made possible by the "1% for art" law passed in France by André Malraux at the beginning of the 1950s and which stipulated the percentage of the budget of a public construction project that had to be consecrated to a work of art. In 1965 the first issue of the review Le Mur Vivant (or The Living Wall) was published, prefaced by Raymond Lopez, Maurice Novarina and Le Corbusier. It was a hallmark date for artists committed to the integration of art into architecture and Sabatier became a committed member of the movement. Top architects of the period commissioned him for the conception and realization of interior elements, where Sabatier's works often had an important, functional role: partitions, doors, screen walls. Sabatier conceived his projects in collaboration with architects, rarely producing stand-alone pieces but instead works that worked within the global conception. His works figure in private buildings (company headquarters, banks, insurance companies) as well as in public spaces (high schools, universities, city halls, courthouses), both in France and internationally (in particular Belgium, Germany, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Iraq). Pierre Sabatier continually explored new forms. In 1981, he designed the Kaleicycloscope, a metamorphic projection space in perpetual movement, made of pearl-finished aluminium and composed of rotating cylindrical elements.