Philippe Perrot

Philippe Perrot was born in 1967 in Paris. As a young man he became fascinated with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italian New Wave cinema and enrolled in film school, though no institution name or precise years are documented. From the 1990s onward he abandoned cinema and turned to painting as a self-taught artist, with no record of formal art school training.

His paintings, often built up on a yellow ground with paint mixed with disinfectant, depicted everyday scenes and bodies in states of intense psychological pressure, described by his gallery and by critics as records of confinement, absurdity, and captivity in ordinary life. In 2009 he was a finalist for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France's leading contemporary art prize, which was won that year by Saadane Afif. His work was included in the Pinault Collection exhibition "Le monde vous appartient" at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2011 and 2012. He also showed at Clifton Benevento in New York in 2014, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo in 2005, and Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles in 2004, alongside his primary Paris gallery, Art : Concept.

Perrot died on September 23, 2015, in Paris, at the age of 48, following a long illness that French press identified as cancer. In 2019 his estate donated six works to the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris, and the museum devoted a monographic presentation to him from April 4 to November 2, 2025, drawn substantially from that gift. He is not to be confused with the nineteenth-century French painter Philippe Parrot (1831 to 1894), an unrelated artist who shares a close variant of his name.

Recognition came comparatively late and concentrated around a handful of institutional moments: the 2009 Prix Marcel Duchamp nomination, the 2011 to 2012 Palazzo Grassi exhibition of the Pinault Collection, and the 2025 Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris retrospective built from the estate's 2019 donation. Writing on the occasion of that retrospective, critic Jean de Loisy discussed Perrot's work in Les Inrockuptibles in 2025. Critical commentary consistently frames his work as a compressed, urgent record of confinement and everyday psychological strain rather than as a stylistic exercise.

Perrot's auction presence is thin, consistent with an oeuvre of only around 130 paintings largely held in his estate and in museum and private collections. Phillips has sold at least two works at auction, including Sens mon intimite for GBP 21,250 and La Chute for GBP 16,250, though the exact sale dates could not be confirmed in current research and these figures should not be treated as a certified, comprehensive all-time record. Christie's and Chiswick Auctions have also brought individual paintings to sale, including a 1994 canvas at Christie's titled Ta mere, but detailed price and date records for these were not available. Given how rarely his work appears at auction, individual results carry limited predictive value for the broader market.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Perrot, and his estate is concentrated with a single Paris gallery, Art : Concept, which is the most reliable route for verification and provenance research. The oeuvre is unusually small, and public auction appearances are rare, so pricing data available today is limited and should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable trend line. Because his name closely resembles that of an unrelated historical painter, Philippe Parrot, collectors should confirm attribution carefully before relying on any auction listing or provenance document.