Michel Gérard was born in Paris in 1938. He studied at the École des Arts Appliqués and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He began exhibiting his sculpture and drawings in the early 1970s, when his work was informed by surrealist idioms and the energy of 1968. Gérard experimented with the demonumentalization of public art and the status of statue. Later, in the 1980s, he created several large-scale site-specific public art projects in forged steel, coal, and handmade paper responding to the decline of the industrial era. In particular, these works engage a process of transformation of materials in geological time and the impact of human involvement. His work began to enter private and public collections and in 1989 he moved to New York. The city provided new resources and materials for his work. During the last twenty years he also worked with memories of his childhood in occupied Paris during the Second World War. He has had more than fifty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in Europe, the United States, Japan, Korea, and Israel.