Michel Parmentier

Michel Parmentier was born in Paris in 1938. After secondary studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, he trained at the École des Métiers d'Art in Paris from 1957 to 1961, in the advertising atelier, where he met Daniel Buren. He then studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in the atelier of Roger Chastel, documented from 1961 to at least 1963 (some sources extend this to 1965), alongside Vincent Bioulès, Claude Viallat, Pierre Buraglio, and Jacques Poli.

He began exhibiting publicly at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris in 1962, and won the Prix Lefranc in 1963. In the mid-1960s he developed his signature method: folding a canvas into equal horizontal bands, then applying paint or spray so that alternating bands remained bare, producing a systematic, repeatable stripe. He titled his works by the exact date of their execution rather than by descriptive names, a practice that runs through his output, from paintings such as 11 novembre 1966 to 20 janvier 1994. Around this period he joined with Buren, Mosset, and Toroni to form BMPT, presenting their work as a joint rejection of individual style and painterly expression.

Parmentier continued to make and exhibit dated works through the following decades, including pieces from the mid-1980s shown in later gallery retrospectives. He died in Paris, in the 14th arrondissement, on 24 June 2000, at the age of 61.

Parmentier is discussed almost entirely in the context of BMPT and its systematic, anti-expressive stance: he and his three collaborators presented painting stripped to a repeatable procedure, using the fold and the mark as a way of removing individual "style" from the canvas. That framing has carried him into major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Pinault Collection, which included his work in the 2016 group presentation Accrochage at Punta della Dogana in Venice. Renewed institutional attention followed in the late 2010s and early 2020s, with Ortuzar Projects choosing his work for its inaugural New York exhibition in 2018 and Galleria Il Ponte organizing the first Italian retrospective of his work in 2022. The critical consensus treats him as a foundational, if market-quiet, figure in the conceptual reassessment of painting that emerged in Paris in the 1960s.

Parmentier's secondary market is small and specialized. The highest price on record for his work is EUR 85,000, paid in 2013 in Paris for an untitled 1967 canvas; the specific auction house has not been identified in publicly available sources. Specialist French valuation services place his typical auction range for paintings between roughly EUR 10,000 and EUR 85,000, with smaller works and works on paper trading well below that band. Documented recent results, such as a 1965 painting sold at Crait + Muller in Paris for EUR 13,000, sit within that range. Since 2014, Galerie Loevenbruck in Paris has represented the artist and his estate, which is organized as AMP, Fonds Michel Parmentier, in Brussels, and has mounted repeated solo presentations of his work at galleries and fairs.

There is no confirmed published catalogue raisonne for Michel Parmentier; verification of works should run through Galerie Loevenbruck and the artist's estate in Brussels. His auction history is thin, with relatively few public sales and a wide price range depending on period and format, so any single result, including the EUR 85,000 record, should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable benchmark. Because auction catalogues sometimes render his name in full capitals ("Michel PARMENTIER"), collectors should note this is a formatting convention and not a different artist. His strongest source of durability is institutional: deep museum holdings and a growing run of gallery and museum retrospectives since the mid-2010s.