Antoine Grumbach is an artist urban architect and professor emeritus at the Ecole nationale d’architecture Paris-Belleville. He was awarded the Grand Prix National d’Urbanisme in 1992, and was invited to present his work at the Centre Georges Pompidou in the same year as part of a solo exhibition devoted to him.
In his teaching as well as in his creative work, Antoine Grumbach explores the fields of linguistics, psychoanalysis, surrealism and situationism. Large scale, writing and drawing have always accompanied his “wandering”.
I have always had a fascination for the encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert.
The innumerable plates and technical drawings accompanied by erudite texts constitute a kind of collective memory that fascinates me (…) This aspect of incompleteness enchants me, because today all knowledge is incomplete and fragile (…)
Faced with the numerous pictures raised by these reflections, I tried to take the hand, the drawing hand, and the writing hand to conceive boards without subject, without discourse but open to all possible interpretations in a kind of wandering of the mind. This unfinished set made of writings and automatic drawings realizes a kind of encyclopedia of my wandering imagination (…) The ruins, the primitive hut, the imaginary constructions and the piles of earth often slip into my drawings.
In 2019, he put forward a proposal for the Grand Paris project,considering the Paris Rouen Le Havre axis as the megalopolis of the 21st century. In 2012, Antoine Grumbach and Jean-Michel Wilmotte won the Grand Moscow project, and his projects and achievements include the restructuring of the historic district of Shanghai, the University of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the inhabited bridge over the Thames in London, the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, the Paris tramway and the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand metro station.
Since 2015, Antoine Grumbach has been working on global metropolitan issues and is dedicated to a reflection on Metropolitan Land Art and Aerial Art, notably through his collaboration with ECT to shape the inert lands of Greater Paris into landscaping projects combining circular economy and land art.