Ben, whose real name is Benjamin Vautier, is a French artist of Swiss origin, born on July 18, 1935, in Naples (Italy), to an Irish and Occitan mother and a French-speaking Swiss father. He is the grandson of Marc Louis Benjamin Vautier, a 19th-century Swiss painter. He spent his first five years in Naples. After the declaration of war in 1939, Ben and his mother traveled extensively: Switzerland, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, etc., before finally settling in Nice in 1949. He studied at the Parc-Impérial school and at the Stanislas college boarding school. His mother found him a job at the Le Nain bleu bookstore as an errand boy, then bought him a bookstore and stationery store.

At the end of the 1950s, he sold it to open a small shop, the facade of which he transformed by accumulating a quantity of objects and in which he sold second-hand records. His shop quickly became a meeting place and exhibition venue where the main members of what would become the Nice school met: César, Arman, Martial Raysse, etc. Close to Yves Klein and seduced by New Realism, he was convinced that “art must be new and bring a shock”.

In the early 1960s, several artists tried to appropriate the world as a work of art. Ben would sign everything that had not been: “holes, mysterious boxes, kicks, God, chickens, etc.”, linking art and life, explaining that everything is art and that everything is possible in art.

In 1965, in his shop, he created a three-by-three-meter gallery on his mezzanine: “Ben doubts everything. » He exhibited Biga, Alocco, Venet, Maccaferri, Serge III, Sarkis, Filliou… In the early 1980s, on his return from a year spent in Berlin thanks to a scholarship, he met young artists (Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa, François Boisrond, Rémi Blanchard, etc.), a group to which he gave the name Figuration Libre.

involved in the contemporary scene, he has always supported young artists and gives his point of view on all current events, whether cultural, political, anthropological or artistic, in his regular and prolific newsletters.

He has lived and worked since 1975 on the heights of Saint-Pancrace, a hill in Nice. Ben’s work is held in the world’s greatest private and public collections, including MoMA in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, the MUHKA in Antwerp, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Solothurn Museum, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, and the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice. Died in 2024.