David Hardy . Suisse Marocain

David Hardy, who comes from Koblenz, embodies the idea of the artist as a cosmopolitan like few others today. David Hardy, who has given himself the artist's name "Le Suisse Marocain" (The Swiss Moroccan), lives after studying painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, mainly in Paris, but optionally also in Sicily, Madagascar or Japan.

Together with international and French artist colleagues, David Hardy made use of French law in 1996 and, in Fluxus style, occupied a vacant building at 59 rue de Rivoli, which became one of the most famous art centres in the middle of Paris: the Parisian artists' house "59Rivoli".

The artist lives and exhibits here regularly. The colourful, unconventionally radical artist's house utopia is a hybrid of living and exhibition space and at the same time an artist's collection - the Musée Igor Balut. It has more casual visitors than the Centre Pompidou has paying ones.

The artist likes to paint over cash register books and old maps to the point of making the given geographical boundaries unrecognisable. The transgression of conventions and the spontaneous-intuitive adaptation of artistic drawing to the content of the original map are ways of combining precise knowledge of the lives of local people with the surreal transmission of observations. With sketches, copies and collages, Le Suisse Marocain makes the world his own. He paints the suitcases in which his works arrive and even his clothes. Each of his artworks has its patina, each object clings to its fate.