Cyprien Gaillard

Cyprien Gaillard was born in 1980 in Paris. He studied at ECAL, the Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne in Switzerland, from 2004 to 2005, and graduated in 2005. His early work already showed the concerns that would define his practice: postwar social housing, tourist sites, and the slow or sudden collapse of built environments, rendered across photography, video, and sculpture.

He gained wide international attention with The Recovery of Discovery, a 2011 installation at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin built from stacked crates of Belgian beer that visitors were invited to drink and destroy over the course of the show. The same year he had a solo presentation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp. In 2011 he also received the Preis der Nationalgalerie fuer junge Kunst. His work has since been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and MoMA PS1 in New York in 2013, K20 in Duesseldorf in 2016, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2021, and Palais de Tokyo and Lafayette Anticipations in Paris in 2022, alongside group appearances in the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008) and the 54th and 58th Venice Biennales (2011, 2019). He is described in current art-press coverage as living and working between Paris and Berlin.

Institutional writing on Gaillard consistently frames his work around entropy and the built environment: postwar housing towers, quarries, stadiums, and other monuments to twentieth-century ambition, shown in the process of erosion, demolition, or reclamation by nature. His jury citations for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and the Preis der Nationalgalerie fuer junge Kunst, along with his inclusion in two Venice Biennales and a run of solo shows at major museums including the Centre Pompidou, the Hammer Museum, MoMA PS1, and K20, place him among the most institutionally recognized artists of his generation working across film, photography, and sculpture. No verbatim critical review passage from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

Cyprien Gaillard's market is difficult to read from public auction data alone. Documented results are inconsistent in scale: a work sold at Heritage Auctions for USD 625 on 26 January 2022, while Artprice has separately described an unspecified work reaching a reported record of USD 193,000 in New York, with no title, auction house, or exact sale date disclosed. Market-tracking service MutualArt names a work titled Queen City as his current record-price work as of 2026, but does not publish the sale price, currency, auction house, or exact date, so that figure cannot be independently confirmed here. His commercial activity runs primarily through Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery on the primary market, with museum exhibitions and prizes functioning as the clearest available signal of institutional demand.

Gaillard's institutional record, two major European prizes, national pavilion-level biennial appearances, and representation by Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery, is considerably deeper than his public auction footprint. Available auction results range widely, from low four-figure sums to an unverified 2026 record attributed to a work titled Queen City, and there is no published catalogue raisonne to anchor provenance research. Collectors should treat any single auction data point with caution and rely on gallery and museum documentation, rather than auction averages, when assessing individual works.