Born in Paris on 28 April 1939, Louis Durot is a singular figure in contemporary French creation, at the crossroads of chemistry, engineering and design. His trajectory, marked from childhood by formative events, shaped a sensibility at once rigorous and visionary. Louis Durot's works have been exhibited and sold by a great number of galleries. Between 1994 and 2009, approximately three hundred of his editions were sold worldwide, and continue to be today.
On 23 December 1943, when he was just four years old, Louis Durot and his family were victims of a denunciation and taken in a roundup at Plascassier, deported towards the Auschwitz extermination camp. On 24 December, the German soldiers did not want to be burdened with prisoners before the next train; they released them with the intention of recapturing them later. Louis Durot was then hidden for two years by a goat keeper, Madame Guizol, who concealed at Magagnosc, in the south of France, a dozen Jewish children. It was in this refuge, at the foot of a lane where a river flowed, that young Louis sculpted his first clay toys — the founding gesture of a life entirely devoted to matter and form.
In 1960, Louis Durot entered the Faculty of Sciences. He obtained a degree in mathematics and mechanics, before joining the company Equipiel in 1963, where he worked as an engineer on prototype nuclear power stations. The parent company then offered him an in-depth training in organic chemistry, making him an expert in synthetic materials. Between 1966 and 1972, he led a dozen research contracts.
In parallel, from 1964, he founded the Freelane Studio, a collective bringing together artists from various disciplines, driven by shared plastic ambitions. It was through this network that he met painter François Arnal, who introduced him to César Baldaccini in 1966.
Louis Durot became César's assistant for two years, putting his chemical engineering skills at the sculptor's service. In this studio, he deepened his mastery of polyurethane foam — the material of César's famous Expansions — and found in it the medium that would be at the heart of all his work. It was also through César that he came into contact with Pierre Restany, founder of the Nouveaux Réalistes, as well as Arman and Robert Malaval. These decisive encounters introduced him fully into the world of contemporary art.
In 1968, Louis Durot created his first personal works and set up his studio at 35, rue Léon, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. His period sketches already reveal a fantastical universe populated with mushrooms, carnivorous plants and organic forms evoking science fiction and comic strips. That same year, he created the Aspirale — an emblematic seat that stands within the tradition of radical 1960s design while asserting a resolutely pop aesthetic: colourful forms, bearing no trace of assembly, with the appearance of a single, monolithic material.
In 1972, Louis Durot founded Durgalith, a chemical company specialising in polyurethanes, which he sold in 1997 to the company Soprema. He continues today to serve as director of research, and has been responsible for around ten patents and processes that have driven the financial success of its division at Soprema for thirty years. This dual expertise — industrial and artistic — forms the core of his creative identity: his pieces are made by hand, in a material he masters from within, and their formal perfection owes as much to the chemist's know-how as to the artist's intuition.
Noticed by Pierre Restany, Louis Durot has exhibited regularly in Europe, the United States and Asia. From 1998, he developed a significant presence in China; in 2002, the Guangdong Museum of Art in Canton devoted a solo exhibition to him entitled Dreamy Toys in the Adult World, which led to an invitation to teach as professor at the Canton Academy of Fine Arts. His work is today present across three continents — Europe, the United States and Asia — and features in the permanent collection of the Vitra Museum, one of the world's foremost institutions dedicated to design.