Stéphane Ducret was born in Lausanne and currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

He obtained a Master's degree in art and art history at the HEAD (Haute école d’art et de design, Geneva), where he was a student of Silvie Defraoui, Gilles Porret, Claude Sandoz and Christian Marclay (who has just been celebrated in a major retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris).

In 2003, he received the Leenaards Grant, which supports young emerging talents with 50,000 CHF (about $/€ 50,000.00).

In 1998, Stéphane Ducret launched his first project, Walls (1998-2000), in which he paints with encaustic (wax) replicas of concrete walls (some of which are inspired by the signature structures of architect Tadao Ando) that he considers a Zen counterpart to the excessive solicitude of images in our lives. A major installation of 12 paintings covering an entire wall was exhibited in 1999 at Camion, Projet d'Art Contemporain, Sierre and was acquired the same year by the Fonds Cantonal d'Art Contemporain (FCAC), Geneva to be permanently installed at the Centre International de Conférences de Genève (CICG).

New York, USA

Embracing the American dream of every aspiring artist, at the age of 29, he moved to New York City and divided his weeks into three essential activities: creating, visiting exhibitions/cultural events and partying.

With his friends (and co-tenants), the multi-disciplinary artist Sébastien Agneessens and the architect Jérôme Schmider, he opened the ephemeral marginal art space The Point in Chinatown/Lower East Side.

Porto, Portugal

After having lived 9.11. live from his studio, shocked by the event and by George Bush’s declaration of war on Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the attacks, he moved to Porto, Portugal for 6 months and essentially devoted himself to painting and learning the local language.

ECAL, Lausanne, Switzerland

In 2002, Stéphane Ducret was invited by Pierre Keller, the director of the ECAL (Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne, Switzerland), to take up a number of positions, including member of the board, professor, head of the propaedeutic year and director of elac (l'espace lausannois d'art contemporain).

Buenos Aires, Argentina

In 2006, at the age of 36, he decided to embrace his lifelong dream of learning Spanish and living in a Latin country. He moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lived for 6 years, alternating digital creation, travel and, once again, partying.

In 2011, he returned to painting and consecutively developed his series Doodle, Open Window On The Possible, Howl and Transcendence by multiplying the experiments of techniques.

ART CLASSE by Stéphane Ducret

In 2016, four years after his return to Geneva, he decided to take a break from his career as an artist, in order to take a step back from more than 20 years of career and out of a desire to share his knowledge of art and painting, he developed a project that would excite him to the utmost and immediately achieve enormous success: ART CLASSE by Stéphane Ducret, a pedagogical program of knowledge transmission, where he offers various immersive learning activities on postmodern and contemporary art, allowing him to further deploy his gifts as a pedagogue.

Central to this program are the Ateliers REAL/FAKE workshops, in which he teaches students how to contextualize the work of pre-eminent contemporary artists and at the same time master their distinct painting techniques, bringing knowledge and practice together with his fun and easy way to perceive postmodern and contemporary art... in other words: learn how to paint like the artists of our time.

Appropriation: the big change

In 2017, Stéphane Ducret returns from a year hiatus from art making with the Real Estate series. The results of his retreat from creation is a new body of work that displays contemporary masterpieces combined in imaginary settings, in which he creates new narratives, disconnected from their original context.

This work reflects a range of artistic and architectural influences and unfolds in highly enthusiastic challenges.

Getting Established

Inaugurated in 2023, My Own Private Museum is a series in which Ducret intends to create his own collection of masterpieces and artists’ portraits that have had considerable influence and importance in his life.

Stéphane Ducret's work forges links with other appropriation artists such as Elaine Sturtevant, Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone and Robert Longo. What sets him apart from his predecessors is his eye for the practice, technique and development of the artists.

ONLINE classes

At the end of 2022, after an exciting year of research and development, Stéphane Ducret decided to give a wider, global audience the opportunity to benefit from his teaching: He launched his first online courses to paint like postmodern and contemporary masters, in English, subtitled in English and French.

LOGO
The ART CLASSE logo is directly inspired by the iconic work of Christopher Wool, a punk artist who became famous for his large-scale paintings made entirely of words painted in black, such as "TRB", "DRNK", or whose phrase "SELL THE HOUSE, SELL THE CAR, SELL THE KIDS" is taken from a famous line in Francis Ford Coppola's film "Apocalypse Now".