The Frac Bretagne brings together for the first time the entire project incorporating central Neanderthal figures produced by British artist since 2012.
Nathaniel Mellors’ works are humorous, irreverent and absurd at times, poetic at others. They evoke themes of possession, history and power.
The first opus of the project, the film The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview (2012) features an interview between an ethereal “modern” man (Truson) and an apparently real Neanderthal. The modern man is unable to read the Neanderthal’s intelligence and in return the Neanderthal plays with him and his expectations of primitivism.
Neanderthal Container (2014) features the reappearance of the character in the form of a Neanderthal stunt-dummy in permanent free-fall. As well as filming the figure falling and
bouncing off trees and buildings in and around Los Angeles, Mellors dropped the Neanderthal figure from a plane over the San Joaquin Valley.
In the last opus of the trilogy Neanderthal Crucifixion (2021), produced by the Frac Bretagne, the Neanderthal man is having a breakdown on the telephone. Maybe the character is crucified in the piece, a kind of small-scale crucifixion.

Nathaniel Mellors (1974, United Kingdom)
Graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2001. His work has notably been shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and at the Art: Concept Gallery, Paris (2014); at the 57th Venice Biennale with Erkka Nissinen for the Finnish Pavilion (2017); at the New Museum in New York (2018) and at Matt’s Gallery in London (2019).