Julien Bismuth was born in Paris in 1973. He received his BFA in studio art from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994, and his MA in fine art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1997. Working in the mediums of collage, installation, and performance, Bismuth’s practice intertwines language and image to examine the interplay of various cultural sign systems. In his work, the artist engages process, gesture, and recombination to transform expression and meaning. In The Catalog Project (2010–11), he wove together hundreds of texts culled from press releases, blogs, and various online sources for art criticism to produce a fragmentary verbal collage critiquing the contemporary excess of language and its potential disintegration into nonsense. In Steganograms (2015), the artist employed sophisticated encryption software to embed text into digital images. Text and image enter into dialogue, yet rather than explicating the images, the textual code distorts them in different ways, ranging from subtle shifts in color and pattern to the total erasure of representation. In an ongoing series, An image as a surface______, begun in 2014, Bismuth explores permutations of the objects, images, and surfaces of the screen-printing process. Consisting of pink mesh screens that are sometimes placed on the gallery floor leaning against the wall—or hung on the gallery wall itself—as well as images printed directly on the wall, these works present a meditation on the iterative process of image making. The prints depict close-up shots of the artist’s hands, which serve as a form of manual sign language for various material actions: folding, tearing, crumpling, etcetera. Each image is the result of the artist’s alteration of a surface, resulting in a literalized visualization of physical gesture. Bismuth’s work has been exhibited at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France (2013) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016). He has also been included in a number of group exhibitions, such as LA Existancial, LACE, Los Angeles (2013); Unlooped-Kino, Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, Russia (2014); The Language of Things: Material Hi/Stories from the Collection, Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2016); and Economie de la tension, Centre d’Art Contemporain Parc St. Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, France (2016). Bismuth has received numerous honors including the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant for Multimedia (2012) and the Résidence Atelier les Arques, France (2013). He lives and works in New York.