Gérard Schlosser

Gérard Schlosser’s tightly cropped, voyeuristic paintings depict hyperrealistic fragments of bodies—a hand, a shoulder, a foot, an exposed breast—and express the intimacy of everyday life in doing so. Schlosser trained as a goldsmith at the School of Applied Arts in Paris, later studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. A master of narrative figuration, Schlosser captures ephemeral moments frozen in time. His cinematic paintings seem to suggest a larger story unfolding beyond the picture plane: A woman’s fingers caress her bare thigh in the foreground while a couple is seen kissing behind her, or another rests her manicured hands nervously on her lap. Some of his works feature glimpses of Fernand Léger paintings seen over a figure’s shoulder. Shooting his own reference photos, Schlosser selects details to cut out and use as the basis of his paintings.