Born in 1938 in Lyon, Rodolphe Proverbio is the son of a silk fabric designer. In 1963, he decided to leave the family business to pursue an artistic career, based on the photogram technique. Proverbio was part of the French post-war movement of experimental photography Libre Expression (Free Expression), exhibiting with artists such as Etienne Bertrand Weill, Jean-Claude Gautrand and Jean Dieuzaide. Proverbio’s work expresses in many ways the Zeitgeist of the Parisian art scene between 1955 and 1965, where geometrical abstraction and non-figurative art coexist together with Op art and Kinetic art. Just as for his predeces- sors Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, Proverbio’s working material is light, but in his search for maximum purity of the trace, he insists even more on movement, notably of the body.
Rodolphe Proverbio’s works can be found in collections such as Musée de la Photographie Arles (FR) and in the Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (FR), as well as many private collections. His work has been exhibited worldwide, and in 2019 in the exhibition, “Le diable au corps. Quand l’Op Art électrise le cinéma”, at the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice (FR).