Franck Miltgen’s practice critically engages with the construction of landscape as a site where history, memory, and materiality intersect. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, he navigates the spatial and symbolic dimensions of both architectural environments and natural terrains. Through a nuanced investigation of form and surface, Miltgen unsettles habitual modes of seeing and meaning-making, producing immersive situations that prompt reflection on our embodied experience of place.

« Central to my work is the notion of the sublime as it is experienced in the contemporary condition of the Anthropocene and the digital revolution — where perception is caught between transcendence and immanence, desire and materiality. The body becomes both a limit and a vehicle, enclosing us in a condition of isolation where reality turns into the Other — the emotional and philosophical ground from which my practice unfolds. Our sensibility has grown distant from the living, from the tangible ground of experience, and this detachment casts shadows over the very conditions of life, defining the fragility of the present moment.

Immersing my work in the tangible world is a way of reestablishing contact with places — with the material reality that surrounds us. The traces I collect become surfaces marked by these encounters, fixing the present as a historic moment: one in which ecological crisis reflects our separation from the environment, intensified by the digital mediation of perception. Once gathered, each impression is imbued with visual resonance, opening a space where what had previously remained obscured can emerge into view.

The ornament lies at the heart of my visual research. It embodies the values of an era, the persistence of collective imagination, and the environments it has shaped over time. My forms draw from a repertoire of historical and natural sources — inscriptions, graffiti, rockeries, arabesques, corals, crystals, exotic flowers, and defensive architectures. These often ambiguous elements compose a grotesque vocabulary, where creation and erosion, generosity and appropriation, transmission and rupture coexist in tension.

Through this visual substrate, the lightness and immediacy of ornament meet the spiritual and conceptual depth of abstract art, producing an anthropic landscape where an informal amalgam of nature and culture reveals the temporal distance between the enduring environment and the immediacy of contemporary experience. »

BIOGRAPHY

Franck Miltgen (b. 1969, lives and works in Luxembourg) studied fine arts in Aix-en-Provence, near Marseille, before continuing his training in Berlin. Based in Luxembourg, he has developed a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, sculpture, and installation, with a particular focus on architectural contexts and public space. His recognition grew through extensive solo exhibitions, notably when he occupied the entire premises of Neumünster Abbey with sculptural works that were monumental, environmental, and always context-related. Miltgen’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Brussels, Tokyo, and Berlin. His practice is deeply rooted in public space, where he has realized large-scale projects such as the monumental glass sculpture Spot and the Wäiss Kaul Project, which featured the concrete installation A Local Coral Reefcreated as part of the European Capital of Culture. A monograph accompanying this project was published by Berlin-based Distanz Verlag in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History in Luxembourg. More recently, Miltgen has expanded into architecture, collaborating with M3 Architectes on Floater, an inhabitable sculpture installed on the historic steel industry basin in Dudelange. His works are included in a wide range of public and institutional collections, such as the National Library of Luxembourg (LU); Ministère de la Culture Luxembourg (LU); Villa Vauban – City of Luxembourg (LU); City of Esch / ANF (LU); City of Dudelange (LU); Lëtzebuerg City Museum (LU); Administration des Bâtiments Publics (LU); Post Group Luxembourg (LU); IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen (BE); Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg (MNHA, LU); and Neumünster Abbey Cultural Exchange Center (LU).