Jean-Claude Farhi was born in 1940 in Paris. In 1942, his parents moved to Nice, where they stayed until 1946, when they decided to move to Colombia. Jean-Claude attended the Lycée Pasteur in Bogotá. At 15, he met a young artist five years his senior, Antonio Ascona, who taught him drawing and awakened his burgeoning vocation.
After eleven years in Colombia, the Farhi family returned to Nice. Not wishing to continue his studies, Jean-Claude worked in tourism and then in the family store while taking drawing classes at the “École des Beaux-Arts”.
In 1959, his first exhibition of paintings took place in a café. Between 1960 and 1962, he served as a medic during the Algerian War; the war was a pivotal experience in shaping his sensitivity. Moreover, his numerous helicopter trips exposed him to unusual perspectives and angles, accustoming his eye to abstraction.
During the 1960s, he created his first "reliefs." In 1964 and 1965, he received the Young Painting and Sculpture Prize awarded by the “Union Méditerranéenne pour l’Art Moderne” (Mediterranean Union for Modern Art) for two consecutive years. The following year marked the beginning of his success with his "Motorcolors," metallic objects assembled with molded plexiglass elements. After an exhibition in Paris at Iris Clert, he was noticed by art critic Pierre Restany. Farhi's first "column" in crystalline plastic dates to 1968; it had a black plexiglass base, and its mass was traversed by oblique-colored strata. It was purchased by Philippe Durand-Ruel.
The same year, he became César's assistant. Meanwhile, he continued his own creations, increasingly interested in polymethyl methacrylate, which he used to create his "balls", "columns" and “disks” manufactured by the Polivar factory in Rome. It was the era of the great boom in plastic materials. Farhi was very proud of the material he had chosen because it had the clarity of crystal and was thermoformable; he integrated colored slices by gluing, and the join was invisible.
In 1970, Farhi exhibited some of his works at the Modern Art Museum in Munich at the invitation of Gunther Sachs. In an article published that same year, Marc Gaillard wrote about Farhi: "the material […] allows for an inner animation through the inclusion of colored elements in the mass, giving his totem sculptures a strange and fabulous inner life." Farhi, a true plastic cabinetmaker, was in high demand. Prominent collectors like Liliane de Rothschild, Jacqueline Delubac, Alain Demachy, or Elie de Rothschild bought columns, and Gunter Sachs asked Farhi to design his bedroom installation at the Palace Hotel in Saint-Moritz. Farhi also created some jewelry, an incredible backgammon table (in several colors variations), and so-called "variable geometry" sculptures.
In 1973, a Farhi retrospective took place at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, cementing the artist's reputation. In 1981, Farhi organized an exhibition in a gallery in New York. From 1991, he turned to raw steel to create monumental outdoor sculptures. Farhi died in 2012.
