Estate Mathieu Ficheroux

Mathieu Ficheroux lived and worked in Rotterdam, the Netherlands from April 22, 1926 until October 11, 2003.
Mathieu Ficheroux worked as a sculptor, painter, draftsman and installation artist. From 1945 to 1949 he attended the Academy of Visual Arts - now Willem de Kooning Academy - in Rotterdam, where he studied in the advertising and publicity department. After graduating in 1949, he remained affiliated with the academy and worked there as a fashion photography teacher until 1953. In 1955 he started painting as an independent artist and from 1960 also focused on sculpture.

Ficheroux's work is characterized by a carefully considered design and perfect execution, to which elements of alienation and damage have been deliberately added. His work is a common thread in the art history of the second half of the twentieth century in his beloved city Rotterdam.

For example, he designed a monument to Louis Davids for the city: a 78 rpm LP with a broken half as a dramatic accent. In 1988 he designed the Anna Blaman Prize for the Rotterdam writer Jules Deelder, consisting of a pure white shirt with an ink stain that was part of the object. In 1975, his best-known work was unveiled in public space: a mural by Multatuli on the Mauritsweg above the Woutertje Pieterse bookstore, a character from Multatuli's work. The mural contains Multatuli's famous quote: “We are all the same size from the moon.” In 1987 the work was moved to Van Oldenbarneveltstraat. In the early 1990s, Ficheroux made several large murals in the former management offices of Hotel New York and designed the sculpture Forgotten Bombardment in memory of the bombing of Rotterdam West on March 31, 1943.

In 1969 Ficheroux received the Hendrik Chabot Prize. In 2008, the Chabot Museum in Rotterdam organized a retrospective of his work