Pol Taburet

Pol Taburet was born in 1997 in Paris, where he lives and works. His family is of Guadeloupean origin. He trained first in applied arts and ceramics, earning a technological diploma in applied-arts decoration around 2014 to 2015 and completing a foundation year at the Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Glaciere, in 2015 to 2016, before continuing to the Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), where he completed a BA in 2019 and an MA in 2021.

His paintings combine airbrush with traditional brushwork to build figures that draw on Caribbean spiritual traditions, including quimbois and Afro-Caribbean ritual imagery, alongside references ranging from Flemish and German late-medieval painting to contemporary music and cinema. His early solo exhibitions at Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris, beginning around 2020, established this vocabulary, and it carried through OPERA II at C L E A R I N G in Los Angeles in 2022.

Institutional recognition followed quickly. In 2022 he became the inaugural laureate of the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize, and in 2023 he was one of six artists selected for the 24th Prix Fondation Pernod Ricard exhibition, Do You Believe in Ghosts?, in Paris. That same year, Lafayette Anticipations gave him his first institutional solo exhibition, OPERA III: ZOO, The Day of Heaven and Hell. In 2024 he had solo exhibitions at the Longlati Foundation in Shanghai and at Mendes Wood DM in Sao Paulo, and in 2025 the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin presented The Burden of Papa Tonnere. In 2026 the French Academy in Rome hosted him as a resident, with the exhibition Paranoia as a Method at Villa Medici running from mid-May to mid-July.

Critics have responded quickly and favorably to Taburet's fusion of figurative painting technique with Caribbean spiritual and mythological subject matter. Critic Ingrid Luquet-Gad is reported to have written about his work in Les Inrockuptibles in 2021, situating his hybrid, humanoid figures within a lineage of provocative, mythologically charged figuration. Art press coverage since has repeatedly framed him as an artist to watch, and Spanish and French cultural press have profiled him as a leading young voice in the current Paris scene. The critical throughline is his use of hybrid, ritual-inflected bodies to carry inherited Caribbean belief systems into a contemporary painting language.

Pol Taburet's secondary market is still in its earliest stages, consistent with an artist only a few years past his MFA. The highest recorded auction price for his work is GBP 203,200 (approximately USD 265,000), paid for the painting Sphinx without a secret at Phillips London on 10 October 2024. Beyond that result, public auction data for the artist remains thin and reported totals vary by source, so collectors should treat any single auction result as an early data point rather than a stable trend line.

Taburet's market sits well ahead of his career stage on the institutional side, with holdings at the Pinault Collection, Lafayette Anticipations, and the Kadist Foundation, and a 2026 residency exhibition at Villa Medici. His auction history, by contrast, is limited to a small number of results anchored by a single GBP 203,200 (about USD 265,000) high in October 2024, so pricing should be read as provisional rather than a settled pattern. There is no catalogue raisonne for an artist this early in his career, so provenance and verification currently run through his two representing galleries, Balice Hertling and Mendes Wood DM.