Youthakone Soumpholphakdy

Youthakone Soumpholphakdy was born in Paris in 1988. Trained in graphic design at the Académie Charpentier, he developed his artistic practice as a self-taught artist. He began his career as an illustrator, deploying a distinctive black-line style. This practice led him to collaborate with a number of brands, creating site-specific works for them, some up to 5 meters long. He has also created public works, notably a mural on the facade of the Collège Paul Valery in Paris XII. Valery college in Paris XII, in collaboration with the Mairie de Paris. At the same time, Youthakone Soumpholphakdy developed his painting, and in 2018 in Paris presented his first solo exhibition. His series of abstract works focused on the shape of astral nebulae, which allowed the artist to deploy a certain taste for gaseous, immaterial and bewitching bodies. Far from confined to plastic writing, his practice extends to many other mediums: drawing, painting, sculpture, 3D video and stained glass. ...

Founded in 2019 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris in a Haussmann-style setting, SEPTIEME opened its second space in September 2022 in Cotonou, Benin, in a 200m2 warehouse in the center of the city, to offer exhibitions in a new format to audiences in the West African sub-region. It made sense for SEPTIEME to deploy its vision spatially and to help push back the frontiers of contemporary art, as well as to contribute to the construction of new contemporary art strongholds.