Jules de Balincourt

Jules de Balincourt was born in Paris, France, in 1972 and moved with his family to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. He earned a BFA in ceramics from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in San Francisco in 1998, and later an MFA in studio art from Hunter College in New York in 2005. In New York he also ran Starr Space, a community and events space in Brooklyn, alongside developing his painting practice.

His work gained early visibility through the 2005 survey Greater New York at MoMA PS1 and the 10th Havana Biennial in 2009. A solo exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo followed in 2010, and museum solo shows continued at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2013), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2014 to 2015, his first in Texas), and the Kasseler Kunstverein in Germany (2015). Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac gave him a Paris solo exhibition, Blue Hours, in 2014. In 2021 the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Malaga staged his first solo exhibition in Spain, After the Gold Rush. He is now represented jointly by Pace Gallery, Victoria Miro, and Thaddaeus Ropac, an arrangement reflected in Pace's 2023 New York solo show, Midnight Movers. He now divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Malpais, Costa Rica.

Museum texts, including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's 2014 to 2015 FOCUS exhibition, have described him as painting from an outsider's vantage point on American politics and marginalized communities, moving between utopian and dystopian registers. Critical writing about him tends to emphasize this duality, along with a visual language that blends pop art, folk art, figuration, and abstraction rather than settling into a single school.

De Balincourt's highest documented auction price is approximately USD 414,656 for a painting, per MutualArt market data. The specific work, auction house, and exact sale date are not confirmed in publicly available sources as of this writing. Beyond this figure, his secondary market otherwise consists of a modest number of results well below that level at houses including Phillips and Sotheby's, consistent with a working, mid-career painter whose primary market runs through his representing galleries rather than through frequent resale.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Jules de Balincourt, so provenance and authenticity checks run through his representing galleries, Pace Gallery, Victoria Miro, and Thaddaeus Ropac, who currently represent his work jointly. His auction history is thin relative to his museum profile, anchored by a single high-value result whose exact sale date is not documented in available sources, so collectors should weigh gallery relationships and museum holdings, which include the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Collezione Maramotti, more heavily than any single auction data point. He remains an active, living artist as of this writing, continuing to exhibit with all three of his galleries.