Richard Texier

Richard Texier was born on 28 June 1955 in Niort, France. He moved to Paris in 1973 to study at the Ecole speciale d'architecture, earning a degree in architecture, and went on to complete a doctorate in plastic arts at the Sorbonne, in what is now Universite Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne. Artprice's biographical record dates the doctorate to 1982.

Texier developed a practice that fuses painting, sculpture, and printmaking around themes drawn from the history of astronomy and his own invented cosmography, producing bronze mythological animal forms and large abstract paintings. Major bodies of work include the Theoria Sacra series, shown at Galerie Pierre Levy in Paris in 2011, and the Pantheo-Vortex series, shown at Galerie Guy Pieters in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 2014. In 2002 he produced a suite of seven Aubusson tapestries, Suite des droits de l'homme, exhibited at the Musee du President-Jacques-Chirac in Sarran. He was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2014, Peintre officiel de la Marine in 2015, and Officier de l'Ordre national du Merite in 2016. He lives and works in Paris and has also spent extended periods in Shanghai. As of mid-2026 he continues to exhibit actively, including a June to July 2026 show at Galerie Sagot-Le Garrec in Paris and a listed presentation with Maruani Mercier in Knokke.

No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed word for word, so none is quoted here. Institutionally, Texier is presented by his own gallery and website biographies as one of the leading French artists of his generation, a description that reflects his own representation and should be read as such rather than as independent critical consensus. What is independently documented is his institutional footprint: exhibitions and holdings at museums in Taiwan, Shanghai, Luxembourg, Brussels, and Paris, a place in the European Parliament's Contemporary Art Collection, and three French state honors awarded between 2014 and 2016.

Texier's secondary market runs primarily through French auction houses. A documented example is the painting La face Nord, which sold for EUR 2,500 at Millon in Paris on 18 January 2024 (lot 57, Post-War Art Contemporain sale). Artsy's auction-results page for the artist places some results in a general $50,000-plus price band, though it does not itemize titles, houses, or dates for those results. The highest price found for any Texier work is EUR 433,050, reported for the sculpture Mundo Rhino, said to have sold in 2014 at Masterpiece Fine Art Auction in Singapore. That figure comes from a single specialist dealer source, could not be corroborated by independent research, and the exact sale date is unknown, so it should be treated as a reported outlier rather than a firmly established record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Texier and no documented certificate-of-authenticity program, so provenance and verification through his current galleries, Maruani Mercier and Galerie Sagot-Le Garrec, matter more than usual. His auction activity is thin and concentrated in French sale rooms at modest price points, and the one reported six-figure result, for the sculpture Mundo Rhino in 2014, rests on a single uncorroborated source with no confirmed sale date, so collectors should not treat it as a reliable benchmark for current market value. His strongest, best-documented credentials are institutional: sustained museum collecting across several continents and formal recognition from the French state.