"César crushes the automobile and finds, in its twisted metal, a brutal poetry of the modern city."
Born Cesare Baldaccini in Marseille in 1921, César (1921–1998) trained at the Beaux-Arts before settling in Paris, where he first welded scrap metal into sculptures of insects and figures. In 1960 he astonished the Parisian art world by exhibiting three crushed automobiles, launching the series of "Compressions" for which he became a leading figure of Nouveau Réalisme alongside Arman, Klein and Tinguely. Working with what the city discarded — car bodies, industrial offcuts, urban debris — César turned the detritus of modern Paris into sculpture, compressing its energy, speed and waste into dense blocks of colour and metal. His work reads the capital not through its monuments but through what it leaves behind.