Nicolas Daubanes
“I engage with fundamental questions: life, death, the human condition, and the social structures that shape them. In my recent works, speed, fragility, porosity, and the spectral quality of images and materials evoke the weight of the past as it meets what is yet to come. My work unfolds over time; it traces a path, a trajectory driven by a search for freedom and a release from constraint.”
For over a decade, Nicolas Daubanes has developed a multidisciplinary practice centered on the prison world, shaped by immersive residencies in detention centers. From his iron-filings drawings to his monumental installations of concrete sabotaged with sugar, the artist explores the tension between suspension and collapse, seeking to capture the vital impulse just before downfall, just before ruin. Iron filings—fine, volatile, and potentially dangerous—used in his drawings and wall drawings evoke prison bars and, by extension, the possibility of escape. Sugar-added concrete draws on acts of resistance during the Second World War, when fighters attempted to sabotage the construction of the Atlantic Wall. Temporary and fugitive, these materials embody both fragility and resistance.
Nicolas Daubanes has exhibited widely in major institutions, including Villa Arson, Les Abattoirs, FRAC Occitanie Toulouse, FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, and MRAC Occitanie. His works are held in significant private and public collections, notably those of Pompidou Center, Villa Medicis, FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, FRAC Sud, FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine, FRAC Picardie... He received the Grand Prix Occitanie for Contemporary Art in 2017, and the Prix Mezzanine Sud from Les Abattoirs, FRAC Occitanie Toulouse in 2017. In 2018, he was awarded the Friends of the Palais de Tokyo Prize. Between 2019 and 2020, he held solo exhibitions at FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Château d’Oiron, and the Palais de Tokyo. In 2021, he received the Drawing Now Prize. In 2022, he presented a solo exhibition at the Drawing Lab as well as a major installation at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Between 2023 and 2025, he undertook a cycle of residencies and exhibitions at Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud.
From 2024 to 2025, he was artist-in-residence at the Villa Medici. In 2025–2026, he presents solo exhibitions at the Panthéon in Paris and the Musée de l’Armée – Les Invalides, followed by an exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.