Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: here is an artist who deserves more than your condescending nods and conventional references. Gully, this mysterious alchemist of the canvas born in 1977, has been forging a body of work for over fifteen years that breaks our certainties about contemporary art. Behind the voluntary anonymity hides a creator who handles appropriation with rare intelligence, transforming our common references into an intimate theater of childlike wonder.
His artistic journey begins in the 1990s within the graffiti culture of the Paris region, where he learns the art of visibility and recognition. But unlike his contemporaries who extended their urban practice into galleries, Gully made a clear break in 2008, adopting a new pseudonym to mark this transition from illegality to the studio. This break, for that is precisely what it is, reveals an artistic maturity that refuses the ease of biographical storytelling to focus on the essential: the work.
For Gully’s work does not merely recycle street art codes in the codified space of contemporary art. It draws from the great tradition of postmodern appropriation while infusing it with a narrative dimension of its own. His large-format canvases depict children in sumptuous settings, confronted with masterpieces of art history. These little characters, Andy, Jean-Michel, and Salvador, are not mere passive spectators but full-fledged actors who interact, play, and sometimes even transgress in front of canonical works.
Bergson’s memory and the architecture of childhood
Gully’s work is particularly illuminated by Bergson’s philosophy of memory. Henri Bergson, in his fundamental work Matter and Memory published in 1896 [1], develops a revolutionary conception of temporality that finds a striking echo in the art of our anonymous painter. For Bergson, memory is not a simple reservoir of stored memories in the brain, but a dynamic process that actualizes the past in the present of action. This temporal conception, which distinguishes between habit-memory and pure memory, offers a fertile framework to understand Gully’s artistic approach.
When we observe the artist’s canvases, we witness this Bergsonian actualization of artistic past in the present of the aesthetic experience. The children painted by Gully embody this pure memory of which the French philosopher speaks, this capacity to make the past emerge not as mechanical repetition but as new creation. They do not reproduce the masters’ gestures but reinvent them with the spontaneity of childhood. In The Children meet Picasso, Murakami, Haring, Magritte, Koons, Basquiat, De Saint- Phalle and Lichtenstein 29 (2023), auctioned for 195,000 euros in 2024, we see children dancing and playing in a museum room, surrounded by sculptures and famous paintings, turning artistic heritage into a contemporary playground.
This memorial dimension is closely linked to the architecture of the spaces that Gully paints. His sumptuous settings, whether imaginary museums or fantasized studios, constitute as many Bergsonian space-times where the artistic past coexists with childlike spontaneity. Bergson emphasizes that “our present is the very materiality of our existence” [1], and it is precisely this materiality that Gully captures in his pictorial architectures. The marbles, gildings, and learned perspectives form a material setting that allows the actualization of artistic memory.
The child in Gully’s work thus becomes the privileged mediator of Bergson’s temporality. He is neither in the pure repetition of the past nor in the forgetting of the heritage but in this intermediate zone that Bergson calls “attentive recognition,” where memory becomes creative. The artist’s little characters recognize the works of the masters while diverting, questioning, and inhabiting them differently. They actualize the artistic heritage not as museum conservators but as creators in the making.
This Bergsonian approach to memory helps to understand why Gully refuses the facile historicism of pastiche to favor creative appropriation. His children do not visit a dead museum but inhabit a living space-time where Picasso can meet Warhol, where Hopper dialogues with Basquiat. This temporal co-presence, impossible in traditional linear history, becomes natural in the Bergsonian memorial space created by the artist. Gully’s architectures thus function as machines to actualize artistic time, spatiotemporal devices that allow the impossible encounter between eras.
Architecture also plays a fundamental role in this memorial economy. The spaces painted by Gully are never neutral: they carry within them the memory of art places, of those “cathedrals” that are museums and galleries. But the artist inhabits them with a childlike presence that radically transforms them. Gully’s child does not contemplate art from a respectful distance but immerses himself bodily in it, actualizing through play the virtuality of past works.
This architectural dimension reveals another facet of Bergson’s legacy in Gully: the critique of the spatialization of time. Bergson reproaches Western thought for “spatializing time,” that is, conceiving it on the model of geometric space. Yet, Gully’s architectures seem precisely to escape this critique by creating hybrid space-times where classical geometry is inhabited by the lived duration of childhood. His perspectives are never purely geometric but always animated by the playful presence of children who transform them into temporal playgrounds.
Postmodern appropriation and institutional critique
The second interpretive framework illuminating Gully’s work comes from American critical theory, and more specifically from Hal Foster’s studies on postmodern appropriation. In his book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture published in 1983 [2], Foster analyzes appropriation strategies developed by artists of his generation as a form of resistance to consumer culture and traditional art institutions.
Appropriation in Gully’s work is part of this critical tradition while standing out through its playful and narrative dimension. Where artists analyzed by Foster, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, for example, practiced appropriation that was often cold and conceptual, Gully warms the exercise with the presence of his little characters. This difference is not trivial: it reveals a shift from institutional criticism towards a more inclusive and educational approach to art.
Gully’s children do not denounce the museum institution but reinvent it. They transform the sacred space of the museum into a playground, thereby revealing the possibilities of a less solemn relationship with art. This approach aligns with Foster’s concerns when he calls for a postmodern art of resistance rather than reaction [2]. Gully’s work indeed resists cultural intimidation while avoiding gratuitous iconoclasm.
Institutional criticism in Gully’s work thus involves affirming a right to art for all, including the youngest. His canvases function as discreet manifestos for the democratization of access to art. The children he paints are not model visitors who respect museum rules but curious explorers who freely appropriate the artistic heritage. This gentle transgression reveals the implicit codes of the institution while proposing a benevolent alternative.
Appropriation in Gully’s work also operates as a critique of artistic originality. By staging the encounter between children and canonical works, he reveals that all creation is rooted in a prior heritage. His little characters do not plagiarize the masters but engage in dialogue with them, updating Foster’s teaching according to which “appropriation reveals that every representation is always already appropriation” [2]. This mise en abyme of artistic influence mitigates the anxiety of influence while celebrating cultural transmission.
The critical dimension of the work also reveals itself in the choice of anonymity. By rejecting personal celebrity, Gully implicitly critiques the economy of contemporary artistic stardom. As he himself explains: “it is his work and the stories he tells that must prevail, not his person.” This ethical stance follows in the tradition of postmodern critiques of the artist-author developed by Foster and his contemporaries.
Gully’s anonymity also reveals an acute awareness of the commercial stakes of contemporary art. By eschewing media personalization, he preserves a space of creative freedom that escapes the logics of personal branding. His greatest works, now exceeding €100,000 in estimate, testify to commercial success that has not compromised the integrity of his approach. This paradoxical success, a famous anonymous, a system critic acclaimed by the market, illustrates the fertile contradictions of postmodern art analyzed by Foster.
Institutional criticism in Gully’s work is finally expressed in his relationship to art history. His appropriations do not respect traditional historical chronology but create fruitful anachronisms. When he makes Rockwell dialogue with Picasso or confronts children with Magritte’s works, he reveals the arbitrariness of historical classifications while asserting the permanent contemporaneity of great works. This approach aligns with Foster’s analyses of the complex temporality of postmodern art, which mixes epochs and blurs established genealogies.
The economy of wonder
But reducing Gully’s work to its theoretical dimensions would miss its essential charm: its ability to evoke wonder. Because behind the conceptual sophistication lies a deeply generous work, which focuses on aesthetic pleasure rather than intellectual intimidation. The children painted by Gully are our ambassadors in the art world: they show us the way to an unreserved relationship with creation.
This economy of wonder is particularly evident in the artist’s painting technique. His mixtures of oil paint, acrylic, markers, and aerosols create a rich materiality that captivates even before one understands the message. Gully perfectly masters the codes of photorealism when reproducing the works of the masters, but he also knows how to playfully subvert them when his children intervene in the image. This technical virtuosity serving an accessible message is one of the strengths of his work.
The artist has also developed a genuine gallery of recurring characters that act as familiar figures for the viewer. Andy (a clear reference to Warhol), Jean-Michel (Basquiat), Salvador (Dalí), or Pablo (Picasso) return from canvas to canvas, creating a narrative continuity that holds the gaze. This serial dimension, inherited from his graffiti years, allows Gully to build a coherent universe where each new work enriches the whole.
His commercial success testifies to his ability to reach a wide audience without sacrificing artistic demand. Sales records, for example €168,000 at the hammer for his triptych Children meet Delacroix, Géricault, Poussin and Manet/Children meet Banksy, Gully, Obey, Jonone/Children meet Picasso, Hopper, Hirst in 2021, reveal a strong demand for art that reconciles sophistication and accessibility.
This success obviously raises the question of the commercial exploitation of institutional critique. How can art that interrogates the institution’s codes triumph in the very market it claims to criticize? The answer may lie in the very nature of postmodern appropriation, which has learned to live with its contradictions. Gully does not pretend to escape the art market but maintains a space for questioning and aesthetic pleasure within it.
His refusal of solo exhibitions since 2017, motivated by “a lack of available paintings,” also reveals an acute awareness of these issues. By limiting his production and prioritizing quality over quantity, he preserves the uniqueness of his work against market pressures. This strategy of scarcity paradoxically strengthens his critique of contemporary artistic productivism.
Gully’s work thus questions our relationships to cultural heritage, the artistic institution, and the transmission of knowledge. He does so with intelligence and generosity that command admiration. In an art world often turned inward, this voluntary anonymous reminds us that art can still be a shared language, a meeting space between generations and sensibilities.
His amazed children are perhaps what we have lost along the way: that ability to marvel before beauty, to play with forms, to tirelessly reinvent our relationship with the world. Gully offers us a lesson in humility and hope: art belongs to no one and belongs to everyone. Sometimes it just takes a child’s gaze to remind us of that.
The artist teaches us that theoretical sophistication and emotional simplicity are not opposed but can nourish each other. His work proves that it is possible to think about contemporary art without giving up aesthetic pleasure, to criticize institutions without falling into nihilism, to inherit from the past without succumbing to academicism. In this, Gully perhaps embodies one of the most promising paths of today’s art: that of benevolent criticism that relies on collective intelligence rather than cultural elitism.
His anonymity, far from being an artist’s affectation, reveals an ethic of creation that places the work before the ego. In a world saturated with images and discourse, this voluntary discretion resonates as a lesson in wisdom. Gully reminds us that true art does not need to make noise to be heard: it only needs to simply touch the audience.
- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1896.
- Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Seattle, Bay Press, 1983.
