Antoine Lefebvre
Antoine Lefebvre is an artist publisher, a researcher and a curator. His artworks are publications, and his publishing activity is an artwork. Through long-term, often collaborative projects, he takes the time to explore various subjects and formats.
Between 2009 and 2013, Lefebvre created La Bibliothèque Fantastique as part of a practice-based PhD in Fine Arts. This publishing project, which took its name from the eponymous text by Michel Foucault, supported his practice-based PhD with the title Portrait of the artist as a publisher, Publishing as an Alternative Artistic Practice finished in 2014.
In 2015, thanks to the help of Phil Aarons, he created ARTZINES, a transmedia open access research project about zines made by artists. He explores the world of artists who make zines, and shares his discoveries through an on line database and a metazine. After a decade of research upheavals, he had amassed an enormous quantity of data and was looking for a way to turn it into a book that would be as captivating as a mystery novel, both in content and form. He worked with the collective Objet Papier to publish in 2025 a one-of-a-kind reading experience, a “choose your own adventure” research publication that embarks the reader on a tailored experience unique for each reader.
Between 2015 and 2019, he collaborated with Farah Khelil on the project bookworm, about the relationship between book-eating and book-loving, shown in Sidi Bou Saïd, New York, Paris, Dubai and Amman.
With the artist publisher and curator Laura Morsch-Kihn, he created Copie Machine, a project in which they temporary transform a space into a free-for-all, free of charge, fully operating copy shop. After being created for a gallery in Rouen in 2017, the project was invited to FILAF, Perpignan 2018, Printroom, Rotterdam in 2019, Clermont Ferrand, FRAC Sud, Marseille in 2022, Le Bal and Shmorévaz in Paris, and Carré d’art, Nîmes in 2024.
He lives and works in Paris where he created 本 \hon\ books, a bookshop and archive whose name was inspired by secondhand Japanese bookshops. Since 2021 the bookshop has been specialising in vintage graphic design and typography rarities. (2025)
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