Mathias Kiss
Mathias Kiss’ practice is rooted in his years spent restoring France’s historic monuments as a decorative painter. Now working between craft and contemporary art, Kiss turns the discipline of that trade against itself, dismantling the right angle to build a language of instability, movement, and illusion.
Kiss left formal schooling at fourteen to train as a house painter, earning his craftsman qualification before joining the Compagnons, the French guild tradition. It was here, restoring France’s historic monuments for over a decade, that he mastered the discipline of the right angle, the very foundation of the trade.
In 2008, with Without 90°, he turned that discipline against itself. The right angle, the plumb line, the spirit level, the square, had been then invisible law of his training, the standard against which every surface was measured, corrected, and made true. Kiss began removing it, building a body from its deliberate absence: gilded moldings that fold and buckle, mirrors that appear to melt, classical ornament pushed past the point of structural sense. At the intersection of heritage craft and contemporary sculpture, his works stage the illusion of their own undoing, the precision of centuries-old technique used not to preserve form, but to destabilize it.
His work has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo and the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Lille, and most recently at the Petit Palais for Nuit Blanche in Paris. His practice also extends into major collaborations, including scenography for Hermès, an edition for Christofle, and a sculpture for Maison Dom Pérignon, alongside his 2026 solo exhibition Out of Time at Galerie Messine in Paris