A fetishist and transvestite artist born in 1900, Pierre Molinier created astounding self-portraits, until the year 1976 when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. Painted or photographed, extremely sophisticated in both staging and technique, his works of art span the entire spectrum of self-eroticism.
Photography especially is what allowed Pierre Molinier to assuage his hermaphrodite fantasies and create himself both a new body and a new identity. By means of self-staging, travesty, cut-outs, collage, superposition and special effects, Molinier portrayed himself as a hybrid and unisex creature, man-woman in one body and one soul, in black and white self-portraits that are as intimist as they are immodest. We often find the artist naked, his penis erect or hidden between his thighs, wearing a mask, basque, falsies, garter belt, stockings and high heels… And so Pierre Molinier’s photomontages and pictorial works of art abound in inextricably intermingling bodies and limbs that are made up and accessorized.
Pierre Molinier’s autobiographical work is now even more topical than ever, to the extent that it touches on different veins of travesty, self-staging, fetishism and questions of identity and genre.