Ernest Pignon-Ernest, a French visual artist, is considered to be one of the precursors of urban art in France.

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Passionate about drawing since always, he quickly became interested in painting, especially after discovering the work of Picasso. At the end of the 1960s, he worked for an architect from Nice and frequented local artists and poets such as Arman, Le Clézio and Bernar Venet. It was during this period that he developed an artistic practice that mixed plastic intervention in reality and the symbolic and anthropological resonances that it evoked, with the street as a background.

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His work, which is both social and poetic, takes the form of collages of patterns translated on paper, which he applies to wall surfaces. In the 1970s, he developed a technique for screen-printing large formats printed on scraps of rotary paper, which became the matrix of his work.

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Pignon-Ernest's works have been exhibited in numerous museums, testifying to his international reputation. In 1995, his artistic creation was presented at the Pinakothek in Munich. In 2013, he participated in the exhibition Genius traits at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. More recently, in 2022, his exceptional work was highlighted at an event outstanding from the Hélène and Edouard Leclerc Fund for Culture in Landerneau.