Patrick
Mimran

I was born in Paris in 1956 and I have been painting since childhood. Nothing in my life has ever separated the hand from the idea.
At twenty-four I took over Automobili Lamborghini.
The company was in difficulty; what it still possessed was a culture in which engineers and sculptors worked in the same building and argued over the same curve.
In the years that followed we brought the Countach to its most complete form, produced the LM, the first high-performance off-road car and the ancestor of every super-SUV sold today, and laid down the Diablo, which carried the marque into the next decade. We also built marine V12 engines that won world offshore powerboat championships.
Those years were not an interruption of my artistic life. They were part of its formation. A car of that kind is a proportion before it is a machine: you approve a line in the morning, and few months later two hundred people have made a prototype in steel, and either it is right or the object is merely fast.
Working at the point where art and technology meet sharpened my eye, taught me the discipline of execution, and convinced me that this was the direction to continue in.
There is an older tradition in which the two were never considered separate disciplines at all, and Italy is where it was invented.
So when I sold the company in 1987, I did not change careers. I continued.
Since then I have painted every day: the achromatic works and the White Light series, in which I reduce the work until only the physical gesture remains, silence, essentially; the polychrome paintings, where noise becomes music once it is structured intelligently; photography; music; and the Billboard Project, which has placed my sentences on walls in New York, Milan, Florence and Venice, interpellating passersby by questioning art and its participants