Catalogue 2024 · The Moulin Family Endowment Fund Collection by Lafayette Anticipations

The Moulin Family Endowment Fund Collection

Latest update: 06/2023

The Moulin Family Endowment Fund

Collection

Cover: Pacific club, 2022, Valentin Noujaïm

Artists

A p. 5

Ackerman, Nick

Afif, Saâdane

Alexi-Meskhishvili, Ketuta

Allouche, Dove

Almendra, Wilfrid

Anesiadou, Danai

Angelo Harrison, Matthew Angioletti, Meris

Antin, Xavier

Arancio, Salvatore

Ardouvin, Pierre

Arnaud, Pierre-Olivier

B p. 32

Bacher, Lutz

Balema, Olga

Balula, Davide

Baudart, Éric

Baudelaire, Éric

Beech, Lucy

Benedict, Will Bertin, Hélène

Blaison, Mélanie

Blatrix, Camille

Blazy, Michel

Bock, Katinka

Bossut, Étienne

Botella, Bruno

Bouroullec, Ronan

Bouroullec, Erwan

Bove, Carol

Brätsch, Kerstin

Budor, Dora

Bueno-Boutellier, Sophie

C p. 60

Calero, Sol

Caubet, Jennifer

Chabanon, Ève Gabriel Chambaud, Étienne

Choisne, Gaëlle

Closky, Claude Coffin, Peter Coindet, Delphine Cornaro, Isabelle

Coste, Anne-Lise

Courrèges, François-Xavier

Crespo, June

Creuzet, Julien

Cruzvillegas, Abraham

Curlet, François

Czech, Natalie

D p. 89

Darling, Jesse

David, Franck

De Quillacq, Jean-Charles Dedobbeleer, Koenraad

Delarue, Chloé

Deraedt, Sara

Deschamps, Marie-Michelle

Discrit, Julien

Douard, David

Dubosc, Sophie

Dubuisson, Julien

Dudu, Vava

E p. 106

E Arar, Aysha

Échard, Mimosa

Effinger, Lotte Meret

Eichwald, Michaela

Eilers, Debo

Étienne, Marc

F p. 116

False, Éléonore

Fauguet, Richard

Feriot, Adélaïde

Firman, Daniel

Flavien, Jean-Pascal

Froment, Aurélien

Fudakowski, Kasia Fujiwara, Simon

G p. 127

Ga, Ellie

Gaillard, Cyprien

Gander, Ryan

Geffriaud, Mark Giacomini, Amélie

Gifford, Lydia

Giraud, Fabien Grasso, Laurent

H p. 138

Halilaj, Petrit

Hawser, Eloise

Hefti, Raphaël

Henrot, Camille

Herbelin, Nathanaëlle Holen, Yngve

Hooper Schneider, Max

Horvitz, David

I p. 150

Imhof, Anne Ivanova, Zhana

J p. 153

Joseph, Pierre

K p. 154

Kahane, Leon

Kapanadze, Nino

KAYA

Keil, Morag

Kiaer, Ian

Kiswanson, Tarik

Kleyebe Abonnenc, Mathieu

Kwade, Alicja

L p. 169

L’Hoest, Eva

Labelle-Rojoux, Arnaud Lakhrissi, Tarek Laric, Oliver Leblon, Guillaume

Lee, Maggie

Lefcourt, Daniel Lemaoana, Lawrence Lewitt, Sam Longly, George Henry

M p. 180

MacLean, Rachel

Magor, Liz

Maire, Benoît Man, Victor

Mangan, Nicholas Marcel, Didier

Margiela, Martin

Marten, Helen McKenzie, Lucy Mercier, Mathieu

Miller, Nicole Mocquet, Marlène Montaron, Laurent Moriceau, Jean-François

Moulène, Jean-Luc

Moulin, Nicolas Mrzyk, Petra Mueller, Ute

N p. 210

Nashashibi, Rosalind

Nashat, Shahryar Nervi, Audrey Neukamp, Anne Noujaïm, Valentin

O p. 224

Olmedo, Berenice

Ourahmane, Lydia Oyiri, Christelle

P p. 230

Panayiotou, Christodoulos

Panchal, Gyan

Papp, Anna Bella Parkina, Anna

Perdrix, Jean-Marie

Perrone, Diego

Ping, Mary

Pippin, Steven

Pulfer, Reto

Py, Géraldine

Q p. 243

Quenum, Chloé

R p. 244

Rakowitz, Michael

Ravini, Sinziana

Reus, Magali

Reynaud-Dewar, Lili

Richardot, Samuel Richer, Évariste

Riedel, Michael

Robert, Jimmy

Roccasalva, Pietro

Rodzielski, Clément

Rose, Rachel

Rousseau, Sylvain Rowland, Cameron

S p. 264

Sadik, Sara

Sæther, Eirik

Sapountzis, Yorgos

Šarčević, Bojan

Scanlan, Joe

Schinwald, Markus

Schönfeld, Sarah Ancelle

Sedlmair, Veronika

Seguin, Élodie

Sehgal, Tino

Sellies, Laura Serpas, Ser

Si-Qin, Timur

Siboni, Raphaël

Sibony, Gedi

Siegel, Amie

Sierra, Gabriel

Sigurðarson, Brynjar

Skaer, Lucy

Smith, Michael E.

Snobeck, Valerie

Sparks, Meredyth

Spooner, Cally

Steegmann Mangrané, Daniel

Stingily, Diamond

Studio Brynjar & Veronika

Suter, Batia

T p. 293

Taburet, Pol

Thornton, SoiL

Tieu, Sung

Trannois, Niels

Trouvé, Tatiana

Tsang, Wu

Tuazon, Oscar

U p. 305

Urbano, Alvaro

V p. 306

Van de Walle, Éric Verde, Roberto

Verna, Jean-Luc

Vogel, Raphaela

Vogt, Erika

Von Brandenburg, Ulla

Y p. 314

Yi, Anicka

The Collection in numbers, p. 315

Nick Ackerman

Date and place of birth: 1976, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States

Lives and works in New York, United States

Nick Ackerman’s work often conjures up a chaotic world, somewhere between order and disorder, mixing geometric forms and metaphysical reflections.

Born in 1976 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Nick Ackerman obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997, then a Master of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts and Crafts in the same city in 2000. In the 1990s, and particularly in 2000, his work was widely exhibited in the United States (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Miami, etc.), but also in France, England, Spain, and Russia. He received support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2004.

Title Entrophy

Date 2006

Materials Painting

Dimensions 76.2 × 91.4 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Messages Abroad, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 05 to 28 Jul. 2007

Two wooden pieces and an imposing pink marble parallelepiped stand out against an off-white background punctuated by drips. Abstract at first glance, the Entrophy canvas actually reveals two figurative motifs from nature: wood and stone, whose veins are rendered here with extreme precision. Characteristic of Nick Ackerman’s work, this work on textures reflects an affinity for matter. While the first wooden upright strictly delimits the left third of the painting, the oblique crosspiece on the right breaks up the general tripartite balance. The artist alternates primary forms with spontaneous movements, creating a post-chaotic universe. The very title of the work maintains this ambivalence: the English term entropy refers to disorder, but by spelling it “entrophy”, Nick Ackerman creates a neologism whose meaning remains mysterious.

Margaux Granier

Saâdane Afif

Date and place of birth: 1970, Vendôme, France Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Combining performance, text, sculpture, installation, and screen printing, appropriation and displacement are at the heart of Saâdane Afif’s artistic practice. Since 2004, the artist has continuously reinterpreted his works through collaborations with musicians and writers, such as Lili Reynaud-Dewar, who write texts based on his creations. Conceived as an open structure, each work is subject to ongoing renewal and transformation within a constellation of meanings to challenge notions of interpretation, perception, and authority in art.

Born in 1970 in Vendôme, Saâdane Afif was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2009 and the Meurice Prize for contemporary art in 2015. His works are in the permanent collection of museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt. Saâdane Afif lives and works in Berlin.

Title Pop (Everyday)

Date 2004

Materials Adhesive letters, holographic paper

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Pop (Everyday) reflects Saâdane Afif’s interest in the passage of time. The text composed by Lili ReynaudDewar was displayed on a wall as part of the exhibition Melancholic Beat at the Folkwang Museum in Essen (2004) alongside the work Everyday. The latter consisted of a hanging into which a copy of the regional daily newspaper Neue Ruhr Zeitung was placed each day. For Saâdane Afif, the idea was to imbue a new transitory temporality to the work of art—traditionally timeless, it was here updated daily. The text on the wall provides a commentary on the work. Inspired by Everyday, it was created according to a specific protocol at the request of Saâdane Afif. It was on the occasion of this exhibition that the texts resulting from his creative collaborations became an essential ingredient in his practice.

Claire Tallon

Saâdane Afif

Title Pop (Laocoon)

Date 2005

Materials Adhesive letters, holographic paper

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

One Million BMP, Centre d’Art le LAIT, Albi from 02 Jul. to 30 Oct. 2005

Title Laocoon (version 2)

Date 2006

Materials Resin, stainless steel

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

The works of Saâdane Afif often consist of a reappropriation of everyday objects or major works from the history of art. More than just a dismembered illustration of the Greek myth of Laocoön, this work is a representation of supreme pain, the kind that leads to or follows on from senseless and deadly sacrifices which fill our modern news reports. Installed as a mobile, body parts are suspended in mid-air, as if frozen in a moment of implosion. From the epitome of beauty of ancient statues to the high ideals one can accept to die for, the body sometimes seeks to escape death, sometimes to succumb to it. A poem co-authored with Mick Peter and printed in iridescent letters is part of the installation, bearing witness to the artist’s attention to words.

Saâdane Afif

Title Brume

Date 2007

Materials Aluminium, reflective adhesive

Dimensions 240 × 390 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Perpetual Battle, BAIBAKOV art projects, Moscow from 25 May to 25 Jul. 2010

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London from 19 Jun. to 20 Sep. 2007

Title Vice de Forme : In search of Melodies (Première mesure)

Date 2009

Materials Paper, Plexiglas

Dimensions 100 × 130 cm (poster) 21 × 29.7 cm (score) 17.6 × 25 cm (labels)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Vice de Forme : In Search of Melodies, Michel Rein, Paris from 22 Oct. to 28 Nov. 2009

Prix Marcel Duchamp – FIAC 2009, Grand Palais, Paris from 21 to 25 Oct. 2009

Drawn from the eponymous series, Brume is an abstract monochrome made from aluminium covered with holographic adhesive. This commonplace material, usually used for road signs, gives the work its iridescent character by sensitizing its surface to the play of light and reflections while opening it up to its environment. Brume reflects and records in an ephemeral way the movements of the visitors of which it delivers a blurred and misty vision in a distant echo of the nineteenth century landscape paintings from which the work borrows its format and its title. The artist’s use of emptiness here also recalls the White Paintings of the American painter Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). Through a process of appropriation characteristic of Saâdane Afif’s practice, the road sign is stripped of all signs, giving way to a misty landscape in perpetual transformation that changes according to the viewer.

Suzana Danilovic

Vice de Forme is made up of a poster and musical scores hung on a wall. The poster announces a performance that took place in 2009 at the Michel Rein gallery in Paris, during which the twelve musical scores composed from the marble sculpture Vice de Forme (d’après Man Ray, d’après Reiser) were set to music. The sculpture is made up of three perfect geometric shapes—a cylinder, a sphere, and a marble cube—which appear in black on the poster. It references both the phallus in Man Ray’s Presse-papier à Priape (1969) and Psychose d’attentat (1974), a comic strip by Jean-Marc Reiser that depicts a nuclear power plant as a phallus with square testicles. At Saâdane Afif’s request, his collaborators created the scores on the theme of heartbreak. These are also listed on the poster which was presented at the FIAC in 2009 in Paris. By accumulating multiple translations of his work, the artist explores the many perceptions of the work of art.

Claire Tallon

Saâdane Afif

Title Noir c’est noir

Date 2013

Materials Plastic, ink

Dimensions 1 × 15 × 2 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions

Title Au Hasard Balthazar

Date 2015

Materials Plastic, ink

Dimensions 1 × 15 × 2 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

This four-colour BIC pen, with its partially black exterior, only writes in one colour: black. Its title is an ironic commentary on the user’s lack of choice. By appropriating an iconic BIC object, Saâdane Afif is drawing on the tradition of the readymade initiated by Marcel Duchamp to question the relationship between the work of art and the brand. He takes the same approach as Claude Closky, who created a pen with four black cartridges for BIC: Ni noir, ni rouge, ni vert, ni bleu. These commercially accessible pens, produced in factories in Montevrain and Tarragona in an artist’s edition of five thousand copies, question the uniqueness and value of the work of art. Noir c’est noir is the first work in a series begun by Saâdane Afif for the launch of the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in 2013. It was followed by Au Hasard Balthazar (2015) and Fauxsemblant (2016).

Claire Tallon

Au Hasard Balthazar is a four-colour pen from BIC with an entirely white exterior. Until the user writes with it, they remain unaware of the chosen colour of the ink. The title of the work draws on popular culture: this expression, which means “let’s take the risk”, is an ironic reference to the randomness of the choice of colour. By appropriating an iconic BIC object, Saâdane Afif is drawing on the tradition of the readymade initiated by Marcel Duchamp to question the relationship between the work of art and the brand. These commercially accessible pens, produced in factories in Montevrain and Tarragona in an artist’s edition of five thousand copies, question the uniqueness and value of the work of art. Au Hasard Balthazar is the second work in a series which includes Noir c’est noir (2013) and Faux-semblant (2016) that Saâdane Afif began for the launch of the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in 2013.

Claire Tallon

Saâdane Afif

Title On Schneller Angereichert Plays Music by Lyrics

Date 2015

Materials Paper

Dimensions 152 × 108 cm (work) 138 × 95 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Do Disturb, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from 10 to 12 Apr. 2015

Title The Laguna’s Tribute

Date 2015

Materials Paper

Dimensions 190 × 139 cm (work) 170 × 120 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, from 09 May to 22 Nov. 2015

Saâdane Afif used the poster in connection with his 2004 sculpture Blue Time (Sunburst), whose reversed out silhouette forms a clock from a guitar case and an amplifier. By conferring artwork status on these pre-existing elements, the artist explores his interest in music and the passage of time, in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. In 2004, Saâdane Afif commissioned Lili Reynaud-Dewar to write the lyrics of a song entitled Blue Time that reinterprets his sculpture. This text forms the basis for a multitude of compositions, listed here in pink ink on the poster, in the field of visual arts and music. This poster refers to the performance of the song by the electronic group Schneller Angereichert, composed of Angelika Reichert and Philipp Schneller, during the Do Disturb weekend of performances at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015. It was released in an edition of twenty-four copies, as well as in two numbered and signed artist’s proofs.

Claire Tallon

This poster announces the performance that Saâdane Afif conceived for the 56th Venice Biennale and which was presented in two locations: both in public space and in the exhibition space. Since 2004, Saâdane Afif has invited artists to write texts based on his creations. He then presents them in the context of performances in which he institutes a dialogue between material and immaterial art. Through these “speakers’ corners”, he explores creation through action, an approach he has explored since 2011 in Beirut, Rotterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. In an enclosed space, he presents an installation, the texts, and the poster announcing the performance. No time is specified so that the event remains improvised. In the public space, an actor perched on a bronze pedestal recites the texts. Facing the lagoon, he presents himself to the public without allowing any interaction. Saâdane Afif quotes the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) is graphically reinterpreted on the poster.

Claire Tallon

Saâdane Afif

Title Faux-semblant

Date 2016

Materials Plastic, ink

Dimensions 1 × 15 × 2 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions

Title Parler en langues (Poster)

Date 2016

Materials Paper, ink

Dimensions 151.5 × 98 cm (work) 159.5 × 106 × 4 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions

This work, a four-colour BIC pen with the artist’s signature, does not have the expected colours. As the cartridges have been switched, the user is unaware of the chosen ink until they use the pen. The title Fauxsemblant draws on popular culture by pointing to the deceptive dimension of colour choice. By appropriating an iconic BIC object, Saâdane Afif is drawing on the tradition of the readymade initiated by Marcel Duchamp to question the relationship between the work of art and the brand. These commercially accessible pens, produced in factories in Montevrain and Tarragona in an artist’s edition of five thousand copies, question the uniqueness and value of the work of art. Faux-semblant is the final work in a series which includes Noir c’est noir (2013) and Au Hasard Balthazar (2016) that Saâdane Afif began for the launch of the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in 2013.

Claire Tallon

The poster announces a performance presented at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris on the occasion of the Nuit Blanche 2016 event. The artist invited the actor Corneliu Dragomirescu to animate the statues in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Chimay with his recitations. Ignoring the spectator, he presented himself as a modern Pygmalion, capable of creating a direct dialogue with the statues. For Saâdane Afif, addressing the monuments of the past is a way of reversing the direction of history. The poster is the only tangible evidence of this performance. It invites the visitor to attend, mentions the many collaborators involved, and presents one of the statues that are to be animated. Here, Saâdane Afif reinterprets the “speakers’ corners” formula that he developed in 2011 for the exhibition Meeting Points 6, and then further developed for The Laguna’s Tribute in 2015.

Claire Tallon

Saâdane Afif

Title Musiques pour Tuyauterie (But I Do)

Date 2018

Materials Plexiglas, ostrich bone, pen, paper

Dimensions 62 × 44 × 20 cm (display case) 15.7 × 4.7 cm (flute) 33.1 × 52.7 cm, 139 × 98 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Musiques pour Tuyauterie, Galerie mor charpentier, Paris from 13 Oct. to 22 Dec. 2018

Title The Fairytale Recording (Lafayette Anticipations poster)

Date 2019

Materials Paper, ink

Dimensions 142 × 98 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions The Fairytale Recordings, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris, 17 Apr. 2019

The installation Musiques pour Tuyauterie (But I Do) features the musician’s attributes—flute and score—as well as the lyrics in dry transfer lettering. The poster that completes the installation shows disembodied hands floating in the void, detached from the musician’s body and positioned so as to hold a flute. Notes from this instrument are also heard in the musical recording that accompanies the installation. If you look closely at the image, the shadow of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal is apparent, a contemporary art cliché but also a prosaic everyday object whose plumbing is essential. The work Musiques pour Tuyauterie refers directly to a recording (Lyrics Records LR. 009-2019) in which the artist sets to music lyrics inspired by his work but written by others. Used since 2016, this process, which allows him to question the interpretation of a work of art, has become fundamental to his artistic practice. The interpretations of each musician offer variations of the original idea that led to Saâdane Afif’s installations. Using music as a vehicle for popular culture, Musiques pour Tuyauterie (But I Do) therefore aims to reach a large audience to present a collective work of art through its interpretation and creation, while allowing Saâdane Afif to step back from his status as an artist to share it with the audience.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

This poster presents Saâdane Afif’s inaugural performance at Lafayette Anticipations in 2019, which built on work begun in 2011 at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin. Displayed on the wall during the event, it provides the credits for the performance. After commissioning texts from Tom Morton, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Mick Peter, Ina Blom, and Tacita Dean, Saâdane Afif composed a performance with the help of soprano Katharina Schrade and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers. The animated lyrics are performed, recited, and finally sung into a vase which is then sealed to create a “magical recording”. The lids of these vases, commissioned from the Nymphenburg porcelain factory, are topped with a figure of the opera singer, while the number, title, and date of the recording appear around the rim. By seeking to freeze the word in the manner of François Rabelais, Saâdane Afif explores the recording of sound before Thomas Edison.

Claire Tallon

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Date and

place of birth: 1979,

Tbilisi, Georgia Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Through both analogue and digital photography, Ketuta AlexiMeskhishvili creates poetic works that explore the dissolving and demarcation of space. She focuses on spatial boundaries and the transitions which make them imperceptible, a theme she also addresses through colourful installations which both open up and close space through the use of screens. Light and the colour blue, a tribute to her native Georgia, are present throughout her work.

Born in 1979 in Tbilisi, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili holds a BFA in photography from Bard College, New York, where she studied under Stephen Shore, An-My Lê, and Barbara Ess from 1998 to 2003. She has lived in Berlin since 2008 and exhibits regularly exhibited in the United States and Europe.

Title Untitled (Braids)

Date 2016

Materials Cotton, paper, fabric, glass

Dimensions 62.5 × 50.6 × 3.5 cm (framed photograph) 350 × 152 cm (curtains)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

The works of Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili stand at the confluence between digital and analogue photography, images that are either straight snapshots or staged in a studio, involving different media and alteration methods. The combination of these processes expresses an experimental and intuitive research into the unstable boundaries between things, playing on the diversity of surfaces, materials, and scales. Untitled (Braids) reveals this search for “existential abstraction” between presence and absence, concealing and revealing. Here, leaving an image impressed onto paper and fabric can refer both to the mechanism inherent to photography and to the subjective and ephemeral traces of an emotion. The braids which hang in the centre of the composition —alluding to a traditional Georgian hairstyle— emerge as a key element of a mysterious presence.

Dove Allouche

Date and place of birth: 1972, Sarcelles, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Dove Allouche explores the concepts of time and the invisible through photography, engraving, and drawing. By immortalizing places with a strong symbolic or historical value, he seeks to reveal the elusive and that which is not immediately obvious to the eye. Inspired by cinema and literature, his work has gradually shifted towards science such as his interest in the biological process of things.

Born in 1972 in Sarcelles, Dove Allouche graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in 1997. He was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome between 2011 and 2012. He is represented by the GB Agency gallery (Paris) and Peter Freeman Inc. (New York). He lives and works in Paris.

Title Le temps scellé

Date 2006

Materials Cardboard

Dimensions 24 × 31 cm (work) 62 × 52 × 3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

L’objet du silence, La Graineterie, Houilles from 25 Jan. to 01 Mar. 2014

L’Abri, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 04 to 13 Apr. 2013

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Made up of a set of thirteen photographic prints, the series Le temps scellé presents a deserted landscape. The human absence suggests a disaster-stricken, even post-apocalyptic place. Dove Allouche travelled to Tallinn in Estonia to the locations for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) to photograph the mysterious “zone” that intrigues the film’s protagonists. Nearly thirty years later, the artist captured this place using the same shots and light used by Tarkovsky. This duality highlights the permanence of the memory of a place where time seems to be frozen or “sealed” according to the title of the work. By mimetically recording Stalker’s topography, Allouche explores his favoured themes of time and the invisible while recreating the atmosphere of a place that evokes both Soviet history and the genesis of a major work of cinematic fiction. Moreover, this series is a tribute to the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose title the artist borrows from the book Le temps scellé : de « L’Enfance d’Ivan » au « Sacrifice » (1986).

Quentin Rose

Wilfrid Almendra

Date and place of birth: 1972, Cholet, France

Lives and works between Marseille, France and Casario, Portugal

The work of the Franco-Portuguese artist Wilfrid Almendra draws as much on composite resources as on various references from art history and pop culture. A sculptor, craftsman, and draftsman, he deliberately favours unexpected associations and disturbing hybridizations in order to disorientate the viewer and invite them to rethink their relationship to the world. Using diversions and enigmatic titles, Almendra very often draws inspiration from everyday life to question human beings and their perception.

Born in 1972 in Cholet, Wilfrid Almendra lives and works between Marseille and Casario (Portugal). A graduate of the École des BeauxArts in Rennes, the Academy of Fine Arts in Manchester, and the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, he won an Audi Talent Award in 2008.

Title Goodbye Sunny Dreams

Date 2006

Materials Wrought iron, aluminium, wood

Dimensions

173 × 215 × 80 cm (sculpture) 353 × 86 × 9.5 cm (base part 1)

390 × 79 × 9.5 cm (base part 2)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Wilfrid Almendra, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise

Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 30 Jul. to 13 Sep. 2020

La Dernière Vague. (This is [not] music), La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille from 25 Apr. to 09 Jun. 2013

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Goodbye Sunny Dreams, whose title could be that of a melancholic rock song, resembles a vision plucked from a dream. Inspired by the world of leisure and festivity, this work draws on the imagery of ghost trains and amusement parks. By also referring to the imagery of the coastline, it points to the composite architecture and decorations of seaside housing environments. The work involves a meeting of materials, references, and forms that appear distant, celebrating the freedom provided by the imagination. A silvery aluminium prow stands out against an exotic wood base. Wrought iron flames rub up against a constellation of colourful ceramic spheres. The instantaneous nature of industrial metal production is faced with the long durations of handmade ceramic production.

Wilfrid Almendra

Title Cuts Across the Land

Date 2008

Materials Peacock feathers, ink, paper

Dimensions 65.4 × 78.4 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Cuts Across the Land, Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris from 28 Feb. to 19 Apr. 2008

Title Killed in Action (CSH #6, Omega, Richard NEUTRA)

Date 2009

Materials Galvanised sheet metal, plastic, wood, aluminium, expanded foam

Dimensions 130 × 210 × 38 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions L’intranquillité, CAC Passerelle, Brest from 05 Oct. 2013 to 04 Jan. 2014

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

An unstable tangle of wavy lines drawn in ink with two peacock feathers superimposed on them, Cuts Across the Land (2008) takes on an unknown form, mysterious and abstract. Open to uncertainty and the strange, Wilfrid Almendra disturbs reality, unbalances it, plays on the absence of points of reference and of logic, on the impossibility of grasping the creative process. Paradoxically harmonious and dreamlike, the drawing offers new avenues for the imagination, like the infinite cuts across the land evoked by the title. The work reveals itself through the prism of careful observation: it is a 360-degree self-portrait, where each line reproduces the outline of the artist’s profile at every degree of rotation. Both a metamorphosis of reality and a metaphor for creation, this subjective and intimate work is above all a humorous nod to the versatile figure of the artist. Almendra ultimately presents the image of an inaccessible mental landscape and paths to constructing a personal imaginary.

Oriane Poret

Killed in Action (CSH #6, Omega, Richard NEUTRA) is a bas-relief that assembles various recycled materials into a geometric composition. The work is part of a series of ten sculptures modelled on the floor plan of a house. Fascinated by suburban architecture and peri-urban spaces, the artist had already begun to work on the house with New Babylon (2009), a work evoking standardized prefabricated houses. In the series Killed in Action, he creates wall sculptures by taking architectural drawings and transforming them into abstract motifs. These drawings, published by the American magazine Art & Architecture, were part of a programme to build modern, affordable homes for army veterans. Wilfrid Almendra focused on ten unfinished house projects. Their incomplete nature and the fact that the soldiers who were killed in action were never able to come and live there lends these works a certain melancholy while denouncing the architectural utopia that defined the typical Californian house.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Wilfrid Almendra

Title Killed in Action (CSH #21, Richard NEUTRA)

Date 2009

Materials Black metal plate, fence, steel

Dimensions 124 × 107.2 × 28 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

L’intranquillité, CAC Passerelle, Brest from 05 Oct. 2013 to 04 Jan. 2014

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Killed in Action (Case Study Houses), Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris from 11 Dec. 2009 to 13 Mar. 2010

Title Killed in Action (CSH #26, KILLINGSWORTH, BRADY, SMITH & Associates)

Date 2009

Materials Asphalt, steel, linoleum

Dimensions 91 × 130 × 16 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Focus Wilfrid Almendra, DRAC Normandie, Caen from 19 to 30 Jun. 2017

L’intranquillité, CAC Passerelle, Brest from 05 Oct. 2013 to 04 Jan. 2014

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Hanging vertically on the wall, the sculpture Killed in Action (CSH #21, Richard NEUTRA) appears as a bas-relief and a repertoire of structural forms. Wilfrid Almendra enhances the art of assemblage using heterogeneous materials and a surprising production process. The sculpture is made of an industrial black steel plate and an old railway fence, and is part of the Killed in Action (Case Study Houses) series created by the artist in 2009. Almendra was interested in an architectural programme launched by the magazine Art & Architecture in 1945 in the United States to design a group of thirty-seven individual houses that would be functional, economical, and replicable. The artist chose to work on those projects that were abandoned, hence the title of the series. Sculpture no. 21 resurrects the mysterious project of architect Richard Neutra. Almendra freely transposes the original plans and materials intended to build the model of the project. He deconstructs the habitat, breaks apart the solid forms, reorganizes details and materials, and introduces personal concepts to deliver a postmodern vision. He questions modernist ideals and the utopia of the suburban model of urban planning to “use rawness to create the sensitive and the poetic.”

Oriane Poret

Killed in Action (2009) is part of a series of ten mural sculptures entitled Case Study Houses inspired by an American construction programme for model homes. These low-cost homes were intended to meet the high demand for housing after World War II. The development of the detached house model helped define the form of these homes, while gradually moving them away from the model of architect-designed houses, which the artist considered more personal. Here, Almendra has reinterpreted some of these projects. Using salvaged materials, such as a piece of asphalt taken directly from a road, he reconstructs an architectural structure consisting of a sheet steel roof laid on thin posts at the edge of a cliff suggested by the irregular edge of the bitumen.

Julie Robin

11 Dec. 2009 to 13 Mar. 2010

Killed in Action (Case Study Houses), Galerie Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, from

Danai Anesiadou

Date and place of birth: 1977, Germany

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Danai Anesiadou trained at the Koninklijke Academie voor SchoneKunsten in Ghent (Belgium) and at DasArts in Amsterdam (Netherlands). Her performances, films, and installations draw on her personal film culture, from the French New Wave to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Dario Argento. She works with the film genre as a source of illusions, beliefs, and expectations about the world that are never realized. She also focuses on the perceived value of materials rather than the materials themselves, on form and formlessness, elevating the latter to the status of a genuine creative medium.

Title Vassilis

Date 2015

Materials Plastic, fabric, paper

Dimensions 65 × 50 × 15 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Vassilis is a summary of resistance to adversity. Danai Anesiadou used plastic bags for vacuum packing personal belongings to create a series of objects that lie somewhere between exquisite corpses and readymades. Vassilis is one such sculpture, which includes a pouch for loose tobacco, a square of silk, and bas-reliefs reproduced on paper. Through metonymy, the work speaks of the daily life of a friend of the artist who gave his name to the piece, but also of the lives of Greek men and women, recounted meagre possessions, who have chosen to stay in their country despite the successive austerity measures they have been subjected to since 2008. Vassilis is what is left in the aftermath of a crisis. It is testimony to a reality, a petrification of the invisible wealth that these people keep with themselves, against all odds.

Matthew Angelo Harrison

Date and place of birth: 1989, Detroit, United States Lives and works in Detroit, United States

Matthew Angelo Harrison creates sculptures that bring together anthropology and industrial design. His work combines original wooden works from African and African-American cultures with acrylic resin replicas which he moulds using a 3D printer. Through his work, which is coloured by the history of colonialism, the artist seeks to disrupt the usual hierarchy of objects and to highlight the problematic aspects of the acquisition and exhibition of African art in Western museums.

Born in 1989 in Detroit, Michigan, Matthew Angelo Harrison is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012). He lives and works in Detroit.

Title Dark silhouette: Composition of borrowed inlets

Date 2018

Materials Acrylic resin, wood

Dimensions 51 × 25.5 × 15.2 cm

Acquisition date 2018

Exhibitions Au-delà. Rituels pour un nouveau monde, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris, from 14 Feb. to 07 May 2023

Berlin Atonal Festival 2021 – Metabolic Rift, Kraftwerk, Berlin from 23 Sep. to 31 Oct. 2021

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Matthew Angelo Harrison is an African-American artist whose sculpture stands at the intersection of anthropology, science fictions and industrial design. His series Dark silhouette consists of African artefacts set in transparent resin blocks, into which he carves reliefs and geometric perforations. Taken out of their native context and inserted into a foreign setting, these artefacts are a reminder that Western museums abound with objects removed from their places of origin by colonial violence. The very material of this figure, wood from another continent, suggests an uprooting, whether long ago or recent, and the push and pull between the lands from which we come—which are often unknown, like the exact provenance of this object—and those we end up calling home.

Meris Angioletti

Date and place of birth: 1977, Bergamo, Italy

Lives and works in Paris, France

Meris Angioletti mixes different worlds and influences in her work, whether it be light and sound installations, slideshows, or photographs. She is equally inspired by early forms of abstraction as by cognitive science, psychology, and esoteric beliefs. In her work, she seeks to translate psychic processes that are sometimes still unexplained, such as the creation of mental images, intuition, or the free association of ideas. In some of her works, Meris Angioletti focuses on research into language, with text present in the form of voices, notes, hypertext, translations, moving figures, and memories in dialogue, among other things.

Title The Curious and the Talkers

Date 2010

Materials Video projection, sound, theatre backdrops, colored gelatin (RGB)

Dimensions 16 minutes

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Meris Angioletti, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims

from 14 Oct. to 23 Dec. 2016

Coded transmission, galerie Schleicher+Lange, Berlin from 28 Apr. to 26 May 2012

Meris Angioletti, La Galerie – Centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-Le-Sec from 17 Sep. to 19 Nov. 2011

21x21 - 21 artisti per il 21° seccolo Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin from 24 Mar. to 05 Sep. 2010

The Curious and the Talkers is a sound and light installation whose soundtrack is a discussion between a woman and a man. This exchange is punctuated by a narrator’s comments on the light and distant visions, as well as by parasitic noises from cars, birds, etc. A projection of RGB (red, green, blue) colours whose superimposition creates a white light accompanies the soundtrack. This projection without any image evokes the notion of “expanded cinema” as defined by Gene Youngblood in the 1970s: it is about pushing back the boundaries of cinema to participate in an extension of consciousness. The soundtrack of the work broadcasts the interviews between Meris Angioletti and Ingo Swann, the creator of “remote viewing”, a technique for viewing at a distance. The artist interviewed him during her research on the links between light, art, and telepathy. These interviews gave rise to conversations that she tried to reconstruct before having them acted out by actors. As for the narrator, he evokes the thoughts of the musician Thomas Wilfred and the architect Claude Bragdon, founders of the Art Institute of Light in New York, an experimental space dedicated to light.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Xavier Antin

Date and place of birth: 1981, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Halfway between graphic design and visual art, Xavier Antin’s work aims to highlight and question the conditions and lines of production and the reproduction of objects. His work reflects on the way modern technologies determine our belief systems.

Born in Paris in 1981, Xavier Antin studied graphic design at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and at the Royal College of Art in London. He worked as a freelance graphic designer before gradually evolving towards an artistic practice that nevertheless remains driven by questions of design and technical production. Xavier Antin currently lives and works in Paris.

Title Five Conversations

Date 2012

Materials Wood, cane, sheet, rubber, polyurethane foam, polyester resin, varnish, ventilation grille, glass, UV glue

Dimensions 38 × 38 × 38 cm (cubes) 24 × 16 cm (publications)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions POP UP Truck, Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 04 Jun. 2016

Tu nais, Tuning, Tu meurs (9th Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne)

Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Saint-Étienne from 12 Mar. to 15 Jun. 2015

La Dernière Vague. (This is [not] music)

La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille from 25 Apr. to 09 Jun. 2013

These five cubes misappropriate several icons of modern design: the “Thonet cube” is based on a cane armchair by Marcel Breuer, a German design pioneer from the Bauhaus in the 1930s. Each cube is industrially manufactured with highly technical materials, for example polyurethane foam used for the manufacture of surfboards, but here the materials are freed from the function for which they are usually destined to become quasi-abstract avatars, conversation pieces as the title of the work suggests. Xavier Antin claims to be a descendant of William Morris, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement born in England at the end of the nineteenth century, one of whose ambitions was to bring art and beauty to the people through design and decoration. The artist nevertheless goes beyond this filiation by questioning modern technologies and by asking an essential question for him, that of the “reappropriation of the means of production.”

Marianne

Tricoire

Salvatore Arancio

Date and place of birth: 1974, Catania, Italy

Lives and works in London, England

At the intersection of science and art, the work of the Italian artist Salvatore Arancio is driven by a focus on the scope and meaning of images. An interdisciplinary artist, he uses photography, animation, engraving, collage, and ceramics to explore the intermediate state between reality and fiction in order to challenge conventional notions of beauty and the sublime. Inspired by nature, psychedelia, and mythology, his practice is guided by the notion of ambiguity. In order to free himself from the technical requirements of photography, Arancio became interested in ceramics in 2011, immersing himself fully in the pleasure of texture and materiality.

Born in 1974 in Catania, Salvatore Arancio holds a master’s degree in photography from the Royal College of Art in London. He lives and works in London.

From the Andes to the summits of Chamonix, Salvatore Arancio revisits scientific imagery through the prism of a poetic and visionary interpretation of nature. Inspired by the illustrations of nineteenth-century geological studies, the artist extracts and digitally manipulates various found images in black-and-white to create landscapes in a romantic vein reminiscent of the paintings of the German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). These epic and sublime visions question the notions of order and chaos while suggesting man’s impotence in the face of nature. In these reflections on natural phenomena and the mineral world, Arancio establishes a strange but coherent geography from which humans are almost totally absent. At once evocative and disturbing, these images disrupt the familiarity of the viewer’s experience to propose an unknown and grandiose setting populated by shadows and rocks.

Oriane

Poret

Title Le grand rappel de l’aiguille du roc

Salvatore Arancio

Title Les Andes

Date 2010

Materials Ink, printed paper

Dimensions 29 × 20 cm (work) 35 × 26 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions An Arrangement of the Materials Ejected, Spacex, Exeter from 01 Oct. to 26 Nov. 2011

Shasta, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome, from 18 Feb. to 31 Mar. 2011

Title Fashioned to a device behind a tree #13

Date 2015

Materials Glazed ceramic

Dimensions 55 × 43 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Fashioned to a Device behind a Tree, Camden Arts Centre, from 15 Nov. to 15 Dec. 2015

Oriane Poret

Mannerist cave, petrified forest, or fungal bloom, work no. 13 in the series Fashioned to a device behind a tree evokes hybrid forms from another world. Salvatore Arancio uses the traditional technique of glazed ceramics to create an image that gives pride of place to biomorphic developments. A translation of nature that draws inspiration from geological phenomena, the work is reminiscent of nineteenth-century symbolist ceramics. At once disturbing and seductive, between the mineral and the vegetal, it imitates the natural world and its capacity to escape routes from a modern world governed by technology. This concept is heightened by a performance in which the artist places his head inside the ceramic. He thus enters into a new relationship with the spectator, abolishing temporality and deconstructing perception to deliver a hallucinatory vision of a world freed from technological excess.

Oriane Poret

Salvatore Arancio

Nanou 2

Date 2015

Materials Glazed ceramic

Dimensions 28 × 51 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions

Fashioned to a Device behind a Tree, Camden Arts Centre, from 15 Nov. to 15 Dec. 2015

A compact, homogenous, two-tone cluster, the invertebrate form of Nanou 2 disrupts and disturbs. A hybrid at the intersection of the natural and the artificial, the mineral and the vegetal, the work blurs the border between fantasy and reality. Salvatore Arancio enters into a relationship with the spectator through a process of visual seduction to lead them to an unknown terrain replete with symbols, between biomorphism and alchemy. The physical reality of clay, like a petrified liquid, is visible in the soft surfaces and the roughness of this quasi-organic sculpture. Inspired by the geological phenomena of lava flow on the islands of Hawaii, Arancio uses the traditional technique of glazed ceramics. The clay is modelled and covered with a vitrifiable coating before being subjected to several stages of firing. With Nanou 2, the artist presents a phantasmagorical contemporary vision and an almost hallucinatory experience.

Oriane Poret

Title

Pierre Ardouvin

Date and place of birth: 1955, Crest, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Pierre Ardouvin expresses himself through several mediums, but he is best known for his installations. They often consist of prosaic objects that he appropriates to invite us to consider them in a new, more poetic light. In this respect, his work descends from the Dada movement and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Popular culture is also a source of inspiration for this artist, who is fascinated by its visual and sonic effects and by the sense of ephemerality that emerges from it. He reinterprets our relationship with the stage, the spectacle, and illusion with stagings that reveal a complex representation of the world between happiness, nostalgia, and disenchantment.

Title Animal Date 2000

Materials Spray paint, marouflaged paper on canvas

Dimensions 220 × 150 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Animal is a work that was first produced on paper which was then marouflaged, i.e. glued, onto a canvas frame. A significant gesture given the graffiti technique used by the artist, a practice that was still considered delinquent in the early 2000s, when this work was created. The transposition from paper, a fragile and prosaic medium, to canvas, the medium of great paintings par excellence, gives it a place in art history. The word “animal” is written simply in capital letters. The paint has run and the letters seem to be dripping with blood. The work denounces the violence perpetrated against animals by human beings. The title has a double meaning: the animal refers to the species we are making extinct, but in a metaphorical sense, the artist challenges us with this word, which becomes an insult, to make us aware of our behaviour.

Justine

Grethen

Pierre Ardouvin

Title Melancolia

Date 2004

Materials Paper

Dimensions

70 × 100 cm (work) 73 × 103 × 3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Chhttt… le merveilleux dans l’art contemporain (Part 2)

CRAC Alsace, Altkirch from 08 Feb. to 10 May 2009

La pêche à la truite, Centre d’Art le LAIT, Albi from 02 Apr. to 05 Jun. 2005

Title Melancolia

Date 2004

Materials Paper

Dimensions

70 × 100 cm (work) 73 × 103 × 3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

La pêche à la truite, Centre d’Art le LAIT, Albi from 02 Apr. to 05 Jun. 2005

This watercolour from the Melancolia series depicts a diving board set amidst the clouds in the sky. This unusual association is imbued with an absurd poetry, inherited from the Dada movement and surrealism. It transcribes expressions of joy such as “being on cloud nine” or “basking in bliss”. There is no character in this composition, as if it were just before or after this leap that we can only imagine. Conceived as a standalone work, this watercolour gave Pierre Ardouvin the idea for an installation, for which he made preparatory sketches entitled Le pays léger (2005), the atmosphere of which differs greatly from the dreamlike world represented in the drawing. As a counterpoint to the title, the diving board is transposed into a small, narrow, dark room. Here, there are no clouds on which to bounce—instead, the diver lands in a pool of dirty water reminiscent of the sewers.

Justine Grethen

Melancolia is a series of watercolours painted by Pierre Ardouvin in 2004. The title refers to Albrecht Dürer’s engraving that canonised the representation of melancholy as an allegory. All the watercolours in this series present juxtapositions of poetic, but also ironic and nostalgic objects. In this work, a head is attacked by a swarm of bees. The face is invisible, hidden by the insects and swollen by their stings. In the midst of the ochre washes, a white mouth can just be made out, writhing in pain. The bony head and the flying insects are reminiscent of the vanitas motif that was popular in seventeenth-century still lifes, a genre that inspires modesty in the human viewer, who is condemned to die in the face of nature, which will always triumph. The bees, which only attack if they are attacked, serve here as a warning of our behaviour towards animals.

Justine Grethen

Pierre Ardouvin

Title Le sommeil

Date 2005

Materials Paper

Dimensions

100 × 74 cm (work) 98.3 × 128.3 × 3.3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Amnésie, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 14 Jan. to 11 Mar. 2006

Title Ruisseau

Date 2005

Materials Artificial plastic rocks, wood, water pump

Dimensions

80 × 720 × 130 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Tout est affaire de décor, MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-seine from 16 Apr. to 04 Sep. 2016

La tempête, Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours from 17 Jun. to 04 Sep. 2011

Oh quel beau débit que le déni de l’eau

Centre d’art contemporain de Meymac, Meymac from 07 Mar. to 19 Jun. 2009

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Amnésie, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 14 Jan. to 11 Mar. 2006

Le sommeil (2005) is a watercolour on paper, a medium that Pierre Ardouvin has worked with extensively. In it, he represents only the head and feet of a figure in profile lying on his back. The title tells us that he is sleeping, but is his body covered or has it disappeared? The artist challenges our idea of the blank sheet of paper covered by the drawing by reversing the roles. He leaves it up to us to imagine this body that is hidden from us, reminiscent of the exquisite corpse game invented by the surrealists. However, the work gives rise to a feeling of unease, the head and feet without a torso evoking a morbid universe where the void becomes a shroud. Perfectly immobile, frozen, eyes closed, has this character sunk into a deep sleep from which he will never awaken?

Justine Grethen

Made from reused industrial materials, the installation Ruisseau reconstitutes the general idea of a landscape. Composed of black plastic tubs found in shops to decorate gardens and chipboard boxes that serve as sculptural bases, this closed-circuit watercourse makes an artificial return to nature. Here Pierre Ardouvin underlines the contradiction and disenchantment between the image of a marvellous world and the materials of our contemporary reality.

Pierre Ardouvin

Title Au théâtre ce soir

Date 2006

Materials Wood, velvet, carpet, armchairs, wall lighting

Dimensions 555 × 525 × 305 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions L’Atelier, Le quadrilatère, Beauvais from 02 Feb. au 01 Mar. 2018

Tout est affaire de décor, MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-seine from 16 Apr. to 04 Sep. 2016

De leur temps, 10th anniversary of the Prix Marcel Duchamp

Musée d’art Moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, Strasbourg from 05 Nov. 2010 to 28 Feb. 2011

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Art Statement, Art Basel, Basel from 14 to 18 Jun. 2006

Title L’abri / Le vent nous portera

Date 2007

Materials Paper

Dimensions 21 × 29.7 cm (work) 33 × 36.5 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Au théâtre ce soir is the title of a television programme featuring recordings of plays broadcast on French television from 1966 to 1986. Pierre Ardouvin takes us back to the nostalgic atmosphere of a family evening during which high culture is broadcast on this popular medium. This dichotomy can be felt in the details of the installation: the red velvet curtains held up by passementerie evoke the great Parisian theatres, but the lack of space in the room and the wooden walls remind us that the show is only an illusion. This is what the spectator is invited to discover when they take their seat in this theatre. After a period of hesitation in front of this work that questions their status, they decide to enter the theatre to take a fresh look at the reality they have just left behind. Having passed through the barrier, they discover the life of the exhibition from the point of view of an artwork.

Justine Grethen

L’abri / Le vent nous portera is a watercolour done by Pierre Ardouvin in 2004. It was used as a sketch to prepare his installation L’abri (le vent nous portera) Drawing is an essential practice for the artist’s production, whether for the study of a project or as a work in itself. “For me, drawing is a way to initially record ideas, to visualise projects,” he explains. “It can go far beyond project drawing, research drawing, to a more automatic form of drawing.” The drawing’s subtitle is the title of a song by the band Noir Désir. Pierre Ardouvin frequently associates popular music with his work. This song evokes the passage of time, against which the shelter could offer a refuge, from which the bubbles of a timeless childhood are always escaping. Nostalgia, a central theme in the artist’s work, is tinged with melancholy in the face of this shelter, which we are unsure is solid enough to not be blown away by the wind.

Justine Grethen

Pierre Ardouvin

Title L’abri (le vent nous portera)

Date 2007

Materials Wood, bubble machine, fan

Dimensions 230 × 230 × 180 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions POP UP Truck, Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 04 Jun. 2016

Histoires sans sorcière, La Maison de La vache qui rit, Lons-le-Saunier from 21 Sep. 2014 to 08 Mar. 2015

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

I’ll be your mirror, Zoo Galerie, Nantes from 12 Jan. to 16 Feb. 2008

French Art Today : Marcel Duchamp Prize

NMOCA – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul from 25 Jun. to 16 Nov. 2011

L’abri (le vent nous portera) is an installation consisting of an upside-down wooden garden shed that produces soap bubbles. Pierre Ardouvin pays tribute to Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, which questioned the status of the artwork in the early twentieth century. The wooden shed is a prosaic object of everyday life, but also a treasure chest for children playing in the garden. A child’s gaze has turned the shed upside down and turned it into a bubble machine. The shack and bubbles also speak to the world of the funfair that Pierre Ardouvin loves for the fantastical ephemeral entertainment it conjures up. The object is precariously balanced and could topple over at any moment... With the tip of the roof positioned on the ground and the bubbles appearing on its surface, it could also seem like this shed is sinking.

Justine Grethen

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud

Date and place of birth: 1972, Lyon, France

Lives and works in Lyon, France

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud does not consider himself a photographer, but an artist using photography as a medium in his work. His approach is based on collecting images from the street and the press, which he then reworks, cuts out, arranges, rephotographs, enlarges, desaturates, etc. These many treatments give rise to new sets of images that resonate with one another. His reflections generally focus on the very nature of the image as well as on its means of production, distribution, and consumption.

Born in 1972 in Lyon, where he lives and works, Pierre-Olivier Arnaud graduated from the École régionale des beaux-arts de Saint-Étienne in 1996.

Title Sans titre (OPE)

Date 2007

Materials Paper, ink

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 7, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 06 Oct. 2011 to 07 Jan. 2012

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Nouveaux Horizons II, Galerie Art:Concept, Paris from 14 Dec. 2007 to 19 Jan. 2008

Sans titre (OPE) is an austere pile of A4 photocopies lying on the floor, unmarked. Three large black letters stand out on the white paper: OPE. The incomplete word offers itself as an enigma, the fragment of a text that we will not know. It is in fact an element of reality transformed by the artist, an extract of a text that he gives us to see in written form rather than in photography, to preserve its mystery. Allowing all interpretations, it allows us to project onto it what we have in mind: an amputated hope (HOPE), an abbreviated car brand (OPEL), or, echoing the term of architecture (OPE), a hole in a structure destined to receive a supporting element. An open object, then.

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud

This quadriptych consists of a Polaroid and three posters. Inspired by the history of monochrome, Pierre-Olivier Arnaud uses only the colour grey and its infinite shades. By moving from positive to negative, the two central pieces with the palm trees make the transition from black to overexposure. After several operations he describes as “de-sublimation,” the image is washed out until the motif dissolves, appearing almost ghostly. The subject then becomes a pretext for a wider reflection on the status of the image, on what is ephemeral and invisible about it. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin, The Preview was Tomorrow questions the depreciation of the work that results from its technical reproducibility. Moreover, the title keeps the spectator in a spatiotemporal fog by playing on anachronism, the preview having already taken place (was) although it will take place tomorrow.

Margaux Granier

Title The Preview was Tomorrow

Date 2007

Materials Offset print

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Jumelage Berlin – Paris from 09 to 18 Jan. 2009

Nouveaux Horizons II, Galerie Art:Concept, Paris from 14 Dec. 2007 to 19 Jan. 2008

Lutz Bacher

1943–2019

Lives and works in New York, United States

The American artist, who adopted a male pseudonym from the outset, produced conceptual work across a range of different media. Her photographs, sculptural arrangements, videos, sound pieces, and installations bring together objects and images that are often part of the collective imagination. Photographs of public figures found in the press that, when copied over and over again, take on a new life, everyday objects, and discarded items found in second-hand shops are integrated into her installations comprising ready-mades, used balloons, marble, and sand. Her appropriations draw on pop culture, pulp fiction, pornographic magazines, popular psychology books, paparazzi snapshots, sometimes with art historical references. The human body, sexuality, power, and violence are key issues in her work, as are the current state of both things and beings, and the fine line between the private and public spheres.

The urinal has a strange descendance in Lutz Bacher’s sculpture Toilet (2013). From this canonical readymade, the artist removes the enamelled porcelain and retains only its soiled shape. Stained with dust and grime, these lava-coloured rubber toilets would be better suited to places of discomfort. While Lutz Bacher recognises the Duchampian heritage of this piece, she also marks her distance from the master in this field: skilled in the representation of sexual and gender identities, this unisex Toilet breaks away from the neutral masculine of Western art history. The artist also turns Fontaine on its head by proposing her own simulacrum, an artefact hostile to any functional use. The use of this vernacular motif is representative of her practice, which has made the familiar a repertoire of motifs for her visual work.

Olga Balema

Date and place of birth: 1984, Lviv, Ukraine

Lives and works in New York, United States

Located at the intersection of different media, Olga Balema’s “semiabstract” sculptural language questions the boundaries of the human by mimicking the regenerative cycles of the body and the communication processes between beings driven by a geopolitics of desire. Her anthropomorphic and deliquescent forms create connections between exteriority and interiority, physically engaging the visitor in elliptical narrative environments. Inspired by literature, the artist also works on the materiality of words and their loss of meaning in an ambiguous tone, which is both light and chaotic.

Born in 1984 in Lviv, Olga Balema has a degree in sculpture from the University of Iowa and a Master’s degree in new media from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Prize in 2017 and 2021. She currently lives in New York.

Title Notes from the Capital Date 2016

Materials Latex, iron, fabric, wool

Dimensions 198.1 × 48.3 × 94 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Prémio Paulo Cunha E Silva, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto from 09 Jun. to 19 Aug. 2018

Olga Balema proposes fictional anatomies as metaphors for the permeability between the environment and the body, two entities which are mutually inextricable. Here, the artist has designed a pseudo-organic sculpture that hovers between the two- and three-dimensional. Torn flesh hangs from the metallic skeleton of Notes from the Capital, its membrane-like material evoking both the body and the clothes that adorn it. A deflated sheath seems to shed its substance, while the strange prostrate composition of Become a Stranger to Yourself, still retaining its substance, comes alive with autonomous mutations. Evocative masses and images float freely about, and iron turns to rust, staining water with a bloodorange hue. Olga Balema invites viewers to penetrate the body with their gaze and discover, as in this protective pod, what constitutes it and what contaminates it.

Olga Balema

Title Become a Stranger to Yourself

Date 2017

Materials PVC, silicone, photographs, water, iron, fabrics, latex

Dimensions 7.6 × 139.7 × 76.2 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Davide Balula

Date and place of birth: 1978, Annecy, France

Lives

and works in New York,

United States

Drawing on science, music, and technology, the work of French artist Davide Balula oscillates between empiricism and playfulness. His interest in the laws of physics, chemistry, and new technologies is driven by a desire to question the limits of perception and imagination. His multisensory and multidisciplinary practice is made up of various experiments and chance encounters that reassess the passage of time.

Born in 1978 in Annecy, Davide Balula studied contemporary music at the Conservatoire d’Annecy and fine art at the École supérieure d’art Annecy Alpes before pursuing his studies at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg and the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. He lives and works in New York.

Title 360 Transparent

Date 2006

Materials Electric guitar, amplifier, tuner, cables, mic stand, guitar stand, chair

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

360 Transparent is an installation consisting of various instruments and amplifiers that give it the look of a concert stage. The objects are in place, as if ready for use. Everything is plugged in and connected. The installation is accompanied by a 1h20 musical soundtrack that runs in a loop, a device evoking a kind of ghostly concert. Davide Balula composed each piece to represent a work of art. 360 Transparent is thus an exhibition in which the pieces are materially absent, but simply evoked through the music, which serves here to represent works and perpetuate their memory. This installation reflects the artist’s interest in working with sound and technology and his exploration of archives and memories.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Davide Balula

Title Static Power Series: The Wooden Pause

Date 2007

Materials Wooden shipping crate, polyester, electrical system

Dimensions 90 × 130 × 90 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2013

L’Abri, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 04 to 13 Apr. 2013

De la place pour le sable, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris from 05 Jun. to 28 Jul. 2007

Title Buried Painting (Room II, Trapdoor I, Palazzo Cavour, Torino)

Date 2014–15

Materials Particles of earth, canvas

Dimensions 95 × 170 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Eugène Leroy

MUba - Musée des beaux-arts Eugène Leroy, Tourcoing from 28 Apr. to 02 Oct. 2022

Cosmogonies, MAMAC de Nice, Nice from 09 Jun. to 19 Sep. 2018

Shit & Die, Palazzo Cavour, Turin from 06 Nov. 2014 to 11 Jan. 2015

The Wooden Pause is part of the Static Power Series that explores the potential of an artwork. This sculpture features a wooden shipping crate filled with pieces of polyester animated by random movements driven by an electronic system. Davide Balula surprises the viewer by confronting them with a work that, as if it had remained in its crate for too long, becomes alive and autonomous.

Davide Balula collects, collates, and organises the indices of memory. Reactivating the recording device which he inaugurated at the Frank Elbaz gallery in 2012, he made new Buried Paintings at the Palazzo Cavour in Turin in 2015. The eponymous diptych, mounted on a single frame, became tinged with the tones of its incubation. The earth was piled up under a wooden floor equipped with trapdoors, in which Davide Balula buried linen canvases for several weeks. When they were unearthed, their surface showed the minute movements of underground life. Through this form of katabasis and then anabasis, the artist proceeds, in his own words, to take “samples”, to “permanently archive” what nature hides from the eye. The Buried Paintings series is thus a “form of photography”, to use Marc Lenot’s words, except that here it is to the dark that this flat surface is exposed before revealing itself in a light-filled room.

Davide Balula

Title Evaporating Water (Floating Puddle Swing)

Date 2016

Materials Wood, water, string

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Objet de tendresse, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 05 to 17 Apr. 2018

Broken Things Float Faster Galerie François Ghebaly, Los Angeles from 16 Sep. to 29 Oct. 2016

The sculpture Evaporating Water (Floating Puddle Swing) was created through the assembly of three materials: water placed sparingly on a wooden board suspended from two large pieces of string. Inspired by natural phenomena, with this piece Davide Balula questions the notions of space and gravity. Small puddles of water form on the surface of the board which is coated with a waterproof substance. These move randomly according to the surrounding airflow and as viewers pass by the board which oscillates like a swing. Davide Balula combines the solid and the liquid in a poetic dialogue that instils water with life-like properties. Despite its apparent formal simplicity, the work is the result of a complex artistic gesture designed to visually reproduce the process of evaporation.

Oriane Poret

Éric Baudart

Date and place of birth: 1972, Saint-Cloud, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Éric Baudart’s practice was initially focused on photography before extending out to sculpture, installation, and video. His works are based on his focus on matter: everyday objects that he appropriates (natural elements, food) and materials that he uses in his technical experiments (resin work). In order to provide us with a new perspective, he zooms in, plays with scale, and sometimes uses the object directly in the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, questioning the status of the work of art.

Title Star Steak

Date 2004

Materials Diasec, mounted photograph, aluminium

Dimensions 286 × 181 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Éric Baudart’s photograph Star Steak humorously and deliberately presents a steak with gigantic proportions. The artist has scanned and enlarged this piece of minced meat to reveal its every detail. The photograph draws our attention to this popular and widely consumed foodstuff and thus invites us to consider what surrounds us but to which we pay no attention. The unusual size of the steak and what it reveals gives it an artistic dimension. The focus on its texture and the blurred of its frozen remnants give the subject a painterly quality. This piece of meat could be a contemporary appropriation of the still life, a memento mori (“Remember that you are going to die”) reminding us crudely of our own mortality and the fragility of the flesh.

Camille Philippon

Éric Baudart

Title Cubicron

Date 2005

Materials Pasta, glass

Dimensions 170 × 45 × 45 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Prix Gruppo Campari

La Maison Rouge - Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris from 17 to 21 Oct. 2007

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Tight Slider, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 20 Mar. to 24 Apr. 2004

Title Black Hole

Date 2008

Materials HD video

Dimensions 3 minutes 18 seconds

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions L’Abri, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 04 to 13 Apr. 2013

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Pétaflops, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 24 May to 28 Jun. 2008

Produced using an unusual assemblage technique, Cubicron is a sculpture made from an unexpected material: spaghetti carefully intertwined to form a cube. The work is all the more startling as we are all so familiar with this food. The piece, which plays on accumulation and repetition, is presented in a glass case that is also cubic, in keeping with traditional presentation techniques. This display invites us in closer so as to discern the details and identify the material. Éric Baudart focuses on the properties and physical structure of the strands of pasta. By removing them from their usual form, he encourages us to reconsider our relationship to the materiality of the elements of our daily lives, an approach that he extends through a series of Cubicrons made of metal box springs or cellular plastic foam.

Camille Philippon

We might not immediately recognise water when approaching the dark matter shown in Black Hole, but it is nevertheless its endless flow that is the subject of the video. In inviting us to take a new look at this fundamental element, the work plays with our perception through the choice of colours, shapes, and framing. The artist creates a moment in which to heighten our awareness through a new framing of the banality of the chosen subject. By moving beyond its usages, he is able to concentrate on the physical properties of water. Éric Baudart employs this practice to show us other facets of matter in his resin sculptures (the Cryst series) which emulate frozen water. In contrast to this “black hole”, the incessant rhythm of the water’s movement is interrupted in complete transparency to better reveal another dimension of the material’s behaviour.

Camille Philippon

Éric Baudelaire

Date and

place of birth:

1973, Salt Lake City, United States Lives and works in Paris, France

Éric Baudelaire holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (USA). In 2012, he received the Audi Talents Awards (Contemporary Art category) for his work Enigma of memory: memory of enigma. Éric Baudelaire’s work came to attention in 2006 when his photographic diptych The Dreadful Details caused a stir at the Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan. After focusing on photography’s ability to represent and distance itself from reality, Éric Baudelaire turned his attention to text and information as materials for his work, leading to an aesthetic break in his practice. From his earliest works to his most recent, whether through images or text, the artist has developed a reflection on the construction of images, the manipulation of documents and their adaptation or contradiction in relation to reality.

For twelve days in 2017, Éric Baudelaire and the curator Marcella Lista transformed Galerie 3 of the Centre Pompidou in Paris into a projection room, forum, and exhibition space. As a counterbalance to the political and media discourse attempting to shed light on the terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015, the artist made the film Also Known As Jihadi about the possible story of a man who joined the Al-Nusra Front in Syria. The film presents the architectural, political, social, and judicial landscapes where the story unfolded. Each evening, events were organized to explore other paradigms, backed by 20thcentury canonical works, to overcome the shock of the attacks and cope with unsatisfactory explanations of jihadism. Edited after these events, the twelve posters displayed through the exhibition give an account of the exchanges that took place.

A for Architecture; C for Commemorate; E for École (School); F for Fukeiron, the theory of landscape; H for Hypnosis; J for Justice; L for Artistes en lutte (Artists in the Struggle); M for Movement-image; O for Oh, my country!; P for Present/Past; R for Rendre des comptes (giving an explanation); T for Time is running out.

Graphic design: Jean-Marie Courant and Marie Proyart, Catalogue Général

Lucy Beech

Date and place of birth: 1985, Hull, United Kingdom Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Lucy Beech makes films that are often situated somewhere between documentary and fiction on the subject of marginalised communities of women. The artist explores how contexts such as biomedicine, death, wellness, diagnoses, and illness result in the construction of a narrative, highlighting the power and production of visibility in relation to the female body as well as the structures of care, wellness, and the economic sectors related to these fields.

Lucy Beech is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art in London and Open School East in London/Margate. She lives and works in Berlin.

Title Reproductive Exile

Date 2018

Materials HD video

Dimensions 29 minutes 50 seconds

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Biennale de Prague: In the Matter of Art, Prague City Gallery, Prague from 21 Jul. to 20 Sep. 2020

Lucy Beech, Video Art At Midnight, Berlin 14 Jun. 2019

Lucy Beech, Vdrome from 02 to 17 Sep. 2019

Family Fictions, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp from 14 Sep. to 08 Dec. 2019

Reproductive Exile, Tramway, Glasgow from 01 Dec. 2018 to 10 Feb. 2019

Hyper Stimulation, Bexhill on Sea and Tramway, Glasgow from 15 Sep. to 02 Dec. 2018

Reproductive Exile tells the fictional tale of a woman involved in a cross-border assisted reproductive technology programme. While highlighting the sexism inherent in biomedical research, this looped film is characterised by the trap of an endless journey revealing the protagonist’s dependence on a complex network of invisible female bodies—human and non-human—that work, care for, and enable her reproductive journey. These bodies are invisibly linked through the production and sharing of animal and human sex hormones essential to reproductive technologies. The film was shot in the Czech Republic, where the lack of legislation on surrogacy offers a range of possibilities to all kinds of would-be parents who travel to the country, driven by the various social, political, and economic forces accompanying the fertility industry boom. The story takes place in a fictitious international private clinic built on the site of a former public sanatorium. There the protagonist meets Eve (short for Evatar), a 3D representation of the female reproductive system.

Le centre ne peut tenir, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise, Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 20 Jun. to 09 Sep. 2018

Will Benedict

Date and place of birth: 1978, Los Angeles, United States Lives and works in Paris, France

Will Benedict trained at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and the Staedelschule, Frankfurt am Main, and was the director of Pro Choice, an alternative art centre in Vienna. His practice makes use of mise en abyme: he paints abstract motifs on polystyrene sheets, hollowing out a rectangular part of the sheet to insert a canvas he has painted. Will Benedict’s pictorial work reveals his interest in semiotics: he blurs the boundaries between frame and image, painting by hand and mechanical reproduction. This approach reproduces our new ways of seeing, such as the possibility of searching by keyword or by image in a search engine.

Title TBD

Date 2014

Materials Gouache, polystyrene foam, aluminium frame, canvas, glass

Dimensions 155 × 216 × 2 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions

The image within an image is a recurring motif in Will Benedict’s work. The mise en abyme feeds into hybrid structures of tabular forms and techniques taken from painting, drawing, photography, and collage. Although the TBD diptych follows a principle of superimposed images, it does not lead to their fragmentation, but rather imbues them with a strange homogeneity. Their interlocking within the space of the painting leads the viewer to a constant movement of the gaze which becomes unable to rest on one of these strange figurative objects that Will Benedict plucks from the world of art and deposits in his work. The artist likes to construct his work around what he calls “culturally pre-arranged compositions” governed by the conventions of image presentation. In this respect, his work seems to be organised according to a principle close to that of Magritte who, by inserting figurative images into abstract sets, put forward a singular ordering of reality.

Hélène Bertin

Date and place of birth: 1989, Luberon, France

Lives and works in Paris and Cucuron, France

Trained in the applied arts, visual artist Hélène Bertin experiments with a mix of techniques (painting, collage, three-dimensional work, computer graphics). Her creative approach oscillates between the minimal gesture of appropriation and the assembly of everyday items to reinvent the history of insignificant or useless objects, working with a wide range of audiences: schools, daycare centres, museums, hospitals, community centres, prisons, hostels, and associations.

Title Dos

Date 2016

Materials Brass

Dimensions 20 × 15 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon, Archives Nationales, Paris, 06 Mar. 2016

This brass brooch is a visual device designed to identify the accompanying team of the Art+Feminism: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in March 2016. Half-sculpture, half-fibula, this brass wire accompanied and lit the teams’ steps while integrating the fight for gender equality in an old memory and playing with the idea of attachment, of virtual and real connections between beings.

Hélène Bertin

Title Dos Date 2016

Materials Brass

Dimensions 20 × 15 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon, Archives Nationales, Paris, 06 Mar. 2016

Title Dos Date 2016

Materials Brass

Dimensions 20 × 15 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon, Archives Nationales, Paris, 06 Mar. 2016

Mélanie Blaison

Date and place of birth: 1981, Nancy, France

Lives and works between Paris and Sèvres, France

Mélanie Blaison has made paper her material of choice. She creates landscapes inspired by the diversity and history of the sheets of paper she finds during her wanderings. This material has a special status in her artistic production. Its widespread availability, as well as the circumstances of its discovery, provide the starting points of her creations. Used, torn, sometimes archival papers, found in places of passage, departure, or arrival (pavements, paths, gardens, corridors, etc.) determine her inspiration. Combining them allows her to represent themes as varied as daily life and travel. The evocative capacity of these papers and the documentation of their history give meaning to their arrangement on the ground. Mélanie Blaison is particularly interested in the relationships suggested by the context of their discovery: “I sometimes favour found and donated papers over purchased papers,” she declared in 2015.

Born in 1981 in Nancy, Mélanie Blaison graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in 2009. She lives and works between Paris and Sèvres.

Title 3 semaines

Date 2011–13

Materials Cardboard, paper, chalk, ink, gum, binding, pigment, glue, cement

Dimensions 115 × 239 × 60 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Agir dans ce paysage, Centre international d’art et du paysage – île de Vassivière, from 07 Jul. to 06 Oct. 2013

The papers are staged based on a balance between the traces dating from before their discovery and the artist’s later additions. Both evidence and a sign of passage, 3 semaines follows a particular sequence while drawing on multiple media and artistic histories. Cardboard and paper marked with ink, eraser, and chalk evoke traditional materials. The artist adds innovations by using dust and cement. She seeks to evoke a sensory experience by adding her own imprint to these papers’ history. Their different arrangements on the floor suggest a synaesthesia with the materials. The familiar process of drawing is brought into question, as the artist explains that “here, drawing is done in a series of gestures”— collecting, sorting, filing, arranging in an administrative order. The recovery of these discarded and abandoned papers reveals man’s omnipresence in a natural world that has been altered, or even exploited.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

Camille Blatrix

Date and place of birth: 1984, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Camille Blatrix’s intimate, funny, and enigmatic sculptures act as invitations to enter into unresolved stories. These narratives inform both the way in which he presents his “objects” (a term that is dear to the artist) and the choice of the finely crafted materials from which they are made, thereby generating an unprecedented “mode of existence” for his work.

Camille Blatrix studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beauxarts de Paris. He won the Pernod Ricard Foundation contemporary art prize in 2014. He lives and works in Paris.

Title La liberté, l’amour, la vitesse

Date 2015

Materials Stainless steel, reconstituted ivory, Plexiglas, polyester, silver, iPad, speaker, electronic system

Dimensions 140 × 45 × 30 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Antéfutur, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux from 06 Apr. to 03 Sep. 2023

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

La complainte du Progrès, MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan from 07 Apr. to 02 Sep. 2018

FluxesFeverFuturesFiction, Azkuna Zentroa, Bizkaia from 11 Feb. to 08 May 2016

La Vie Moderne, 13th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon from 10 Sep. to 03 Jan. 2015

Using advanced production techniques, finely-crafted materials, and unique displays, Camille Blatrix endows his works —half art, half machine— with a very unusual existence. For the 2015 Biennale de Lyon the artist created La liberté, l’amour, la vitesse, a mournful cash machine with no money but full of emotions. It shares its thoughts with users about the inability to satisfy their desires, the disillusionment, and the sadness of the world. “Despite my love for them, cash machines have rarely been able to satisfy my needs”, says the artist, who, to alleviate his distress, created a machine endowed with feelings—a piece of technology that suddenly takes a real interest in the people who use it.

Work produced for the 13th Lyon Biennale, 2015

Camille Blatrix

Title Untitled Date 2018

Materials Aluminium, resin

Dimensions 86.5 × 41 × 61 cm

Acquisition date 2018

Exhibitions Semi-permanent installation, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 10 Mar. 2018 to 28 Apr. 2019

Produced specifically for the basement of Lafayette Anticipations, Camille Blatrix’s Untitled installation reflects the technical functions of the rue du Plâtre building. At first glance, this smooth and icy sculpture seems inanimate, but as you approach, you hear a kind of respiration, like a breath. The work is specifically inspired by the geothermal well (the building’s temperatureregulating pump) and the networks that extend out from it. The artist interprets this fluid mechanics as the generator of a flow of incessant creative energy.

Michel Blazy

Date and place of birth: 1966, Monaco, Monaco

Lives and works in Paris, France

Since the early 1990s, Michel Blazy, who is often referred to as “the gardener of contemporary art,” has been producing ephemeral works ranging from chalk paintings on the ground to sculptures made of shaving foam and frescoes made of carrot purée. Using natural or artificial materials from everyday life, the artist engages in a dialogue with matter through experiments that are more playful than scientific. While he provides the initial impulse, he then surrenders to the unpredictability of the living being which moves through the spacetime of the exhibition through various events and accidents. His installations are thus “never definitive forms, but proposals at a given moment.”

Born in 1966 in Monaco, Michel Blazy graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Pluie d’air

Date 1996

Materials Glue

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

L’Abri, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 04 to 13 Apr. 2013

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Airs de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris from 25 Apr. to 15 Aug. 2007

Fascinated by natural phenomena, Michel Blazy has developed an organic oeuvre where plants sprout from everyday objects, and food becomes sculpture or spreads out into friezes of mildew. His changing installations bear witness to the artist’s interest in the temporal nature of the living. Pluie d’air strays from Blazy’s typical work, focusing as it does on more sinister mutations of matter. Glue dripped down to form stringy formations that solidified in mid-air. Their suspended movement evokes nature gone off course, with altered elements: as if water, laden with the sinister pollution of the air, was taking on the threatening look of petrol, carbon, and all that we burn but that was meant to remain buried within the earth. The image is not, alas, a forecast, and the work is a fiction only for those who refuse to see.

Audrey Pellerin

Michel Blazy

Title L’homme aux oreilles de porc

Date 2005

Materials Bacon, dog biscuit, wood, glue, pig ears, Plexiglas

Dimensions 45 × 175 × 70 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

100 Sculptures animalières – Bugatti, Pompon, Giacometti… Musée des Années 30, Boulogne-Billancourt

from 13 Apr. to 28 Oct. 2012

Vanity Case, Galerie Art:Concept, Paris from 05 Nov. to 23 Dec. 2005

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Title Patman

Date 2006

Materials Noodles, soy, wood, food colouring

Dimensions 260 × 150 × 160 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Les Pléiades - 30 ans des Fracs, Galeries Lafayette - Toulouse, from 27 Sep. to 26 Oct. 2013

Antidote 7, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 06 Oct. 2011 to 07 Jan. 2012

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

A human skeleton whose bones are made of dog biscuits and whose organs are made of bacon slices: this is how Michel Blazy’s sculpture is conceived. Food materials, usually intended for everyday consumption, are here diverted from their function to form an anatomical model. By invoking elements of still life such as the skeleton, the work is akin to a kind of vanitas, a symbol of the fragility of time and the brevity of life. However, far from proposing a melancholic meditation on the futility of worldly pleasures, the installation asserts with humour a drive for life: it gradually changes shape and colour over the course of the exhibition, integrating the incongruous, random, and accidental factors linked to the process of development of the living or to the appearance of external agents such as insects. The sculpture thus develops its own metabolism, like an ecosystem that redefines itself in visual terms and is in constant renewal without the artist intervening. Michel Blazy’s ephemeral work is destined to disappear physically, but also to last virtually thanks to an operating manual.

Franny Tachon

While he claims to want to “connect the cosmos with his refrigerator” by observing the evolution of food products after their expiration date, Michel Blazy creates a work from everyday consumer products and champions the notion of laissez-faire. By appropriating everyday materials and integrating the living into his work, he gives time pride of place in his creative process. His sculpture Patman, for example, consists exclusively of yellow Asian soy noodles. Its appearance is as monstrous and threatening as it is charming and soothing, recalling a primitive creature as much as a mushroom cloud. This fantastic and supernatural vision is in constant transformation as it continuously generates new materials and colours. The work thus expresses the notion of a metamorphosis of the living and of a creation in the making. The installation is therefore “never a definitive form,” but always a “proposal at a given moment” that calls on our awareness of the future.

Franny Tachon

Post Patman, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 01 Feb. to 06 May 2007

Cinq milliards d’années, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 14 Sep. to 31 Dec. 2006

Space Boomerang, Swiss Institute, New York from 24 Jan. to 09 Mar. 2006

Katinka Bock

Date and place of birth: 1976, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Lives and works in Paris, France

Katinka Bock’s sculptures are the result of simple gestures, often directly legible in the form or surface of the work. Shaped by natural physical processes, they are closely linked to the body and often make use of its scale. Bock’s work is based on extremely concrete things (the material, the creative gesture, the weight, the space) while always opening up to new horizons, to something more impalpable and immaterial.

Born in 1976 in Frankfurt, Katinka Bock is a graduate of the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and did her postgraduate studies at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Winner of the 14th Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize and the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award in 2012, she was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2019.

This sculpture represents a simple, wide and shallow wooden bookcase on which are placed folded or rolled terracotta strips that mould to the corners of the object. This combination of two raw materials is characteristic of Katinka Bock’s work: clay responds to wood—the material is used for its ability to transform itself, to produce energy, and to embody the passage of time. The artist’s practice bears witness to a form of spontaneous abstraction reminiscent of post-minimalist sculpture, which she cultivates with an economy of means as well as often through the treatment of a soft and flexible material, in this case terra-cotta. The sensual and almost tactile qualities of the clay that hugs the form of the bookshelf respond to the smooth and rough side of the wood worked by the artist. Everything plays out in the relationship between these materials and these actions (modelling and firing the clay, working with wood), which is reminiscent of the work of the German artist Joseph Beuys.

Marianne Tricoire

Katinka Bock

Title Le Lit

Date 2009

Materials Wood, plaster

Dimensions

200 × 15 × 7 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions A sculpture for two different ways of doing two different things

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris from 14 Nov. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Title Conversation II

Date 2009

Materials Sandstone

Dimensions 47 × 80 × 5 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Art Statements Project, Art Basel, Basel, from 10 to 14 Jun. 2009

Katinka Bock’s work often make clear references to the history of art and modern sculpture by borrowing from the registers of minimal art, conceptual art, and even arte povera. These intersecting influences are at play here: the crude character of the rough plaster is reminiscent of the simplicity of the materials used by Arte Povera artists, while the long, immaculate board evokes the simple forms of minimalist sculpture. The title of this sculpture may appear ambiguous and contradictory, as the horizontality implied by the notion of the bed is opposed to the clear verticality of the work simply leaning against the wall in an unstable position. The material used is also surprising, since it is a plank resembling a wooden strip covered with plaster. The artist creates a form of duality by letting a piece of raw wood protrude from the board in the manner of a tree branch, thus combining a natural element with an everyday domestic object.

Marianne Tricoire

Katinka Bock’s sculpted work derives from the interactions between materials and diverse physical processes. Her refined sculptures result from multiple actions: heating, moulding, rolling, folding, unfolding, flattening, inflecting, etc. Here, fragments of a long slab of broken sandstone are arranged in space, experiencing their own fragility. The first stands with no support, four others lean against a wall, and a sixth, alone and unstable, is attached by a simple string, as if passed through the eye of a needle. Scattered about in this way, the fragments invite viewers to mentally reconstruct the initial configuration—the same exercise that is sometimes carried out before ruins, in an effort to virtually restore their integrity.

Katinka Bock

Title Gisant

Date 2019

Materials Ceramic, oak

Dimensions 65 × 370 × 175 cm (work) 41 × 105 × 70 cm (head)

40 × 168 × 56.5 cm (shoulders) 39 × 163.5 × 58 cm (body 1)

37 × 154 × 83 cm (body 2) 37 × 134.5 × 99 cm (legs)

15 × 92 × 38 cm (feet)

Acquisition date 2020

Exhibitions Katinka Bock: Rauschen, Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover from 06 Mar. to 22 May 2020

Tumulte à Higienopolis, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 07 Oct. 2019 to 05 Jan. 2020

As in Conversation II, Katinka Bock’s work is part of a dual artistic tradition: that of medieval tombs made of ceramic tiles, and the arte povera of the 1960s. The choice of material is part of this dual reference, while at the same time reflecting the artist’s interest in materiality, particularly through the contrast between the apparent ductility and the reality of ceramics, or between the technical process of making this material and its unpredictable nature. This fascination with metamorphosis, from liquid to solid, heavy to light, is also embodied in the two excrescences that protrude from the white plates and form a shroud, as if the recumbent corpse were transcending its condition, seemingly on the verge of transforming itself, in line with Katinka Bock’s attention to the passage of time, the question of transience, and the subjectivity of perception.

Chiara Perez

Étienne Bossut

Date

and place of birth: 1946, Saint-Chamond, France Lives and works

in Rennes, France

Étienne Bossut makes his sculptures out of ordinary objects—seats, cans, refrigerators, kitchen knives, etc.—with self-coloured polyester mouldings. By giving a new status to these industrial objects, he moves them from the field of consumption to that of art. The deceptively truthful results explore the porous relationship between copying, imitation, and creation, while encouraging the viewer to question their relationship to objects.

Born in 1946 in Saint-Chamond, Étienne Bossut graduated from the École des Beaux-arts de Saint-Étienne in 1970. His works are part of numerous French public collections. He lives and works in Rennes.

At first glance, these chairs beneath a green canvas seem to be readymades, ordinary objects appropriated from their initial function according to the concept coined by Marcel Duchamp. However, they are near perfect casts that Etienne Bossut has made in self-coloured polyester, his favourite medium. What difference is there between these casts and their models—the Panton Chair and the Grosfillex chair, true design icons? “It is an artistic image of the chair,” explains Bossut. “If you sit on it, you are sitting on a cast, but it was never a chair, and it can’t become one again.” The artist adds his mark to these casts by inscribing the date of manufacture and his signature in the resin while still fresh. Etienne Bossut proceeds here to a distanced imitation which displaces and transforms the original subject, but through moulding, he indicates that what we are looking at is not the original object—a chair—but its image, its history, that of our society and its habits.

Marianne Tricoire

Étienne Bossut

Title L’eau du jardin

Date 2003

Materials Polyester

Dimensions 160.5 × 57 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Title Laocoon

Date 2005

Materials Resin, translucent gelcoat

Dimensions 180 × 200 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Sculpter (faire à l’atelier), FRAC Bretagne, Rennes from 14 Mar. to 27 May 2018

POP UP Truck, Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 04 Jun. 2016

Laocoon(s), Musée Rodin, Paris, from 15 Oct. 2008 to 22 Feb. 2009

Étienne Bossut is particularly receptive to the beauty of mass-produced industrial objects: metal drums, piping elements, tyres, and gas bottles are among his favourite motifs. Using his favoured process of reproduction by hot moulding, for this piece he uses a can, an everyday, trivial, and industrial object, to which he gives dignity by using multiple examples and seeking chromatic harmony amongst them. He thus avoids any illusionistic effect by modifying the colour of the object used as a model. The title of the work, which is always meaningful for the artist, imbues the sculpture with a form of poetry by recalling the primary function of the moulded object: to contain water. Bossut’s sculptures capture a lost state of the object they imitate. They are artefacts in an archaeology of the present time and of industrial society.

Marianne Tricoire

The titles of Étienne Bossut’s works are essential to their understanding. Carefully chosen, they play with forms and language by referring to the history of art or cinema. They are clues to help us see. The title Laocoon refers to the famous Greek sculpture whose Roman copy is kept in the Vatican Museums: it represents a Trojan priest and his two sons writhing in pain, suffocated by a gigantic sea serpent. Here, the father and his sons have disappeared: only the snake remains and, without its prey, it coils around the void. The accumulation of identical casts of seat and the use of a translucent resin with an organic character give the impression that it is only the slough of a snake or a gigantic insect—caterpillar or millipede— monstrous yet full of grace and poetry. Étienne Bossut proceeds here to a distanced imitation which displaces and transforms the original subject, but through moulding, he indicates that what we are looking at is not the original object—a chair—but its image, its history, that of sculpture and art as a whole.

Marianne Tricoire

P2P – Peer to peer, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg from 26 Jan. to 06 Apr. 2008

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

« One », Galerie Espace MICA, Rennes 2007

Bruno Botella

Date and place of birth: 1976, Sarcelles, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Bruno Botella’s pluridisciplinary approach unfolds through drawing, video, sculpture, and photography. Drawing on multiple scientific and literary references, his work transforms matter into a sort of laboratory of sensory, optical, and mental experiments in which the artist does not hesitate to introduce his own body. His approach is based on the living state of the material, which must constantly be manipulated, transformed, modelled, and truncated.

Born in 1976 in Sarcelles, Bruno Botella is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris and the Cooper Union School of Arts in New York. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Oog onder de put

Date 2012

Materials Plaster, polyester

Dimensions 55 × 48 × 37 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Corps Nouveaux, Centre d’art contemporain – La Traverse, Alfortville from 23 Sep. to 20 Nov. 2021

Art.132-75, Kunstverein Langenhagen, Langenhagen from 26 Apr. to 16 Jun. 2019

Oog onder de put (“Eye under the well” in English) is a plaster and polyester sculpture whose form evokes two entwined arms. Its enigmatic title is characteristic of Bruno Botella’s work and of his exploration of the limits of perception in a permanent tension between the hidden and the visible. The rough aesthetic of the object gives an impression of unfinishedness (non finito). For the artist, each operation is only a stage in the infinite process of creation that reveals the transitory nature of the material. This singular reflection on art and his taste for experimentation lead him towards unusual materials. The modelling clay used (qotrob) has hallucinogenic properties that provoke a state of trance by penetrating the skin through the pores. By engaging physically in the creative experience, Bruno Botella questions the interaction of the body with its environment, sometimes even in its toxicity.

Margaux Granier

Ronan Bouroullec Erwan Bouroullec

Date and place of birth: 1971, Quimper, France

Live and work in Paris, France

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s creations are driven by their particular sensitivity to space and its arrangement. “We have always felt that furniture could help define space,” said Erwan Bouroullec in 2008. They go against the grain of trends to capture the essence of objects. Their creative process draws on common cultural memory and aims to situate the contemporary in a longer-term timescale. To this end, the duo engages in constant confrontation in order to develop their ideas and draw inspiration from new locations as commissions take shape with a range of different materials. Their creativity is also expressed in their research activities and architectural projects.

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec were born in 1971 and 1976 respectively in Quimper. Ronan graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 1995, and Erwan from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in 1998. They have worked together since 1999. They live and work in Paris.

Title Liane 15

Date 2010

Materials Leather, electric wires, light bulbs, resin

Dimensions 21 × 29.5 (26 diam.) cm 15 × 19.5 (16.5 diam.) cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Momentané, Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris from 26 Apr. to 01 Sep. 2013

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec Bivouac, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz from 07 Oct. 2011 to 30 Jul. 2012

Whether in industrial design, office typology, or tableware, the curve reigns supreme in their art, as with Liane 15. At first glance, this creation seems to have been inspired by plant-like forms, but is this light fixture being reclaimed by nature, or are these creepers rather being illuminated by these man-made suspensions? The Bouroullec brothers leave a lot of space for modularity so that their creation can be adapted to any type of interior. The suspension height of the light sources is adjustable thanks to the leather that holds them. Drawing is essential in this joint creative process, the flexibility of which is rendered by the lamps’ soft light. It allows them to perfect the sensuality they seek to achieve, thus creating an object in the service of comfort and daily life. “Putting a rug in an empty room is like lighting a fire,” said Erwan Bouroullec in 2016. Hanging this light in an empty room will produce the same effect of warmth for all those who deviate from the straight line and the rigour of fixed ideas.

Manon Prévost-Van

Dooren

Carol Bove

Date and place of birth: 1971, Geneva, Switzerland

Lives and works in New York, United States

Since the end of the 1990s, Carol Bove has been developing a primarily abstract sculptural practice that is often deployed in public space. She works, distorts, and twists metal to create colourful works whose apparent lightness contrasts with the rigidity of the materials she uses.

Born in 1971 in Geneva, Carol Bove grew up in Berkeley, California, and graduated from New York University. She was the winner of the first Lafayette Prize in 2009, participated in documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012, and represented Switzerland at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Carol Bove lives and works in New York.

Title Untitled

Date 2009

Materials Paper, cardboard, ink, polypropylene

Dimensions 34 × 60.4 × 4 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Carol Bove’s graphic practice relates to her sculptural work in that it functions essentially by combining and assembling diverse objects or elements. The artist’s collages are in keeping with the surrealist tradition and the diversity of sources advocated by this movement, drawing inspiration and motifs from film and 1970s decoration and adult magazines. However, as the historian Johanna Burton writes, “Bove brings things together not to nudge associative impulses into free play driven by the unconscious, but rather to conjure a kind of affective tangle that disrupts any singular, historical narrative.” This collage reflects the poetic and sometimes incongruous spirit of Carol Bove’s work, which combines an image of a woman from a fashion magazine with an ink drawing and elements of landscape photographs to form a harmonious ensemble.

Marianne Tricoire

Dora Budor

Date and place of birth: 1984, Zagreb, Croatia

Lives and works in New York, United States

Born in 1984 in Croatia, Dora Budor is a New York-based artist and writer. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2022), GAMeC Bergamo (2022), Progetto (2021), Kunsthalle Basel (2019), 80WSE (2018), and the Swiss Institute (2015). Her work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including Migros Museum, Zürich (2021); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, (2021); Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2021); MoMA Warsaw (2020); MO.CO Panacée, Montpellier (2020; 2018); Kunstverein Nuernberg (2019), Kunsthalle Biel (2018); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, (2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); K11 Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); MOCA Belgrade (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Swiss Institute, New York (2016); Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (2015), Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz (2015).

She participated in the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams (2022), 58th October Salon | Belgrade Biennale (2021), Tbilisi Biennale 2021: Oxygen (2021), 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2020); Geneva Sculpture Biennale (2020); 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); 13th Baltic Triennial (2018); Vienna Biennale (2017); Art Encounters (2017) and 9th Berlin Biennial (2016). Budor was a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize in 2014 and Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2018. In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. She is a regular contributor to art publications, including Mousse magazine and Texte zur Kunst.

Origin II (Burning of the Houses)

The environment created by Dora Budor creates a post-apocalyptic vision of a barren future through strange miniatures of a world where all that remains is a desolated horizon illuminated by harsh light. Like the ash of the devastating fire suggested by the title of the work, fine dust particles swirl and invade the space. The artist refers here to the two paintings entitled The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1834) by the English painter William Turner, which she chose as they are the “first representations of thermodynamic variations visible in the atmosphere.” Dora Budor draws on stories of anticipation and science fiction, cinema, literature, and painting: her chambers function like the dioramas of the nineteenth century that reconstituted scenes in miniature, but are also reminiscent of the hermetic chambers used for scientific experiments. Multiple references intersect in this enigmatic macrocosm where the poetry and strange beauty of a glowing light like that of an inferno collide with the vision of a desolate universe.

Marianne Tricoire

Sophie Bueno-Boutellier

Date and place of birth: 1974, Toulouse, France

Lives and works between Paris and Marseille, France

Sophie Bueno-Boutellier’s installations are as minimal as they are harmonious. The materials that compose them are part of a mystical world that draws the viewer into a meditative state. They are selected by connotation, the artist ingeniously sowing doubt about her true intentions. The recovered materials Sophie Bueno-Boutellier uses can evoke randomly selected geological relics or intentional assemblages that serve as a narrative pretext. Her work is imbued with her personality and the mystery that she maintains, as she refuses to express herself on the objective reasons for the form of her installations.

Born in 1974 in Toulouse, Sophie Bueno-Boutellier graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice in 2001. She lives and works between Paris and Marseille.

Title Oursin fossile

Date 2008

Materials Earth, wood, branches, brass, plaster

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Archéologies contemporaines Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard from 01 Jun. to 14 Oct. 2012

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Placed on the ground, a mound of earth, reflective brass plates, and plaster and wooden elements draw our gaze and body downwards allowing Sophie Bueno-Boutellier to provoke a sense of introspective contemplation. Each of the materials in this piece seems to be an artefact from an unknown ritual. This assemblage is constructed according to a precise method: the artist collects and selects objects and materials which she then arranges, rearranges, and disrupts until the physical manifestation of an inner questioning emerges. In this way, she brings to the viewer’s attention the multiplicity of meanings that these installations can take on. Oursin fossile mixes subjectivity and universal truth, through which the artist appropriates a contemporary economy of postmodern art. The work questions today’s urgent quest for progress and the use of raw or transformed materials creates an echo between mysticism and modernity. Sophie BuenoBoutellier’s creative power lies in the choice of the arrangement of elements so that every viewer can freely appropriate its message.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

Sol Calero

Date and place of birth: 1982, Caracas, Venezuela

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Sol Calero’s work explores her South American heritage, both individually, through personal and family archives, and collectively. Her interest in the art of the Cusco School (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries) is rooted in a postcolonial perspective, as well as in a reflection on the conception and representation of cultures. Sol Calero’s art is characterised by its syncretic dimension, its intrinsic link with the places in which it was created, and its vivid colours in the Latin American tradition.

Born in 1982 in Caracas, where she lived until the age of seventeen, Sol Calero is a graduate of the Tenerife and Madrid art schools. She currently lives in Berlin.

Title Sombrero y culebra

Date 2019

Materials Acrylic and pastel on canvas

Dimensions 102.5 × 82 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Amtsalon, Berlin (Allemagne) from 01 Dec to 05 Dec 2021

Frieze 2019, Frieze Art Fair, London from 03 to 06 Oct. 2019

Sol Calero, “Archivos Olvidados”, Galerie ChertLüdde, Berlin (Allemagne) from 26 Apr to 15 Jun 2019

By juxtaposing a blue hat, four pieces from a domino game, and a snake on a background of pink wallpaper, like the images in the books and magazines she collects, Sol Calero draws on two different traditions. On the one hand, she refers to her South American origins through the bright colours and the snake, present in Mesoamerican art with the figure of the god Quetzalcoatl. On the other hand, following a residency in Nice, her paintings reflect the influence of Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall, through the free use of colour, the absence of perspective, and the reinvention of the still life genre that are at work in their canvases. More broadly, the symbols of the hat, the snake, and the dominoes appear as abstract images born of the artist’s own memories. They embody issues such as memory, oral transmission, and heritage, inviting us to question the norms of the European perception of the world.

Chiara Perez

Jennifer Caubet

Date and place of birth: 1982, Tonneins, France

Lives and works in Aubervilliers, France

Jennifer Caubet’s uses architecture’s raw materials and forms in her sculptural practice. Her works question the space that they occupy, which they never cease to create since they can be moved. Jennifer Caubet’s “realizable utopias” (Yona Friedman) are inspired by the theoretical architecture of the Archigram collective, but also by Constant’s work and the theories of the Situationist International. Her adaptable and political sculptures can be reactivated to inhabit new spaces and reassess the state of “being in the world” (Marie Chênel).

Title Plugin-Rhyzome

Date 2010

Materials Reinforced concrete, hard oak, steel, steel cable

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions En réserve, École supérieure des Beaux-arts de Nîmes ESBAN from 09 Jan. to 08 Feb. 2023

A Posteriori

La Maréchalerie, Centre d’art contemporain de Versailles, Versailles from 22 Jan. to 22 Mar. 2014

Made of reinforced concrete, steel, and raw oak, PluginRhyzome is an expression of tension. The cables that criss-cross the piece extend out from an octagonal cylinder fixed to a column. In this way, the work sculpts the space in which it is located. Faced with the lightness of the networks it creates, one almost forgets the weight of the materials chosen by the artist. Ethereal, the work appropriates elements usually used in architecture to “occupy a space and define it” (Marie Chênel), in a manner reminiscent of Richard Serra’s work and the theories of Rosalind Krauss. The work “plugs in” and, by imposing itself on the exhibition space, reveals and transforms it. Despite its monumental scale, PluginRhyzome can be dismantled and transported from one space to another to generate new spaces and question our relationship to them.

Camille Philippon

Ève Gabriel Chabanon

Date and place of birth: 1989, Poissy, France

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

A creator of situations, Ève Gabriel Chabanon practices performance, writing, and object-making. They work with local communities and groups of marginalized people to whom they give a voice through the creation of spaces for questioning and debate. These discussions take place around an object or a place and are documented by filmed accounts. Ève Gabriel Chabanon’s participatory and engaged productions stage “identity as a social construct” and are “attempts to think of common narratives in contexts of dispossession, of possible loss”, to use the artist’s own words.

Title Le Plateau

Date 2018

Materials Stucco, steel, wood

Dimensions 88 × 311 × 187 cm

Acquisition date 2020

The work is part of the installation The Surplus of the Non-Producer, see p. 63

Exhibitions Ève Chabanon. Chapter 4: Sold, Beursschouwburg, Brussels from 22 Apr. to 04 Sep. 2021

Chapter 3, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster from 11 Jul. to 04 Oct. 2020

Le surplus, Bétonsalon, Paris from 29 Jan. to 25 Apr. 2020

Take (a)back the economy, Centre d’Art Contemporain Chanot, Clamart from 13 Apr. to 07 Jul. 2019

Le centre ne peut tenir, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondationn d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 20 Jun. to 09 Sep. 2018

With its angular shapes and mineral appearance due to the stucco work on its surface, this table is a part of the work The Surplus of the Non-Producer. The object made by Ève Gabriel Chabanon and stucco craftsman Abou Dubaev is in fact the medium for discussions on the difficulties encountered by creators in exile, designated by the term “non-producers”. The artist gives them a voice and works with them to create the presented objects as well as the fictional short film and documentary made during this meeting. The sculpture-table thus carries within it the weight of these accounts which evoke the legal, political, systemic, and material reasons behind the situation of these non-producers. The title also refers to the notion of “surplus”, which refers to the value and economy of this non-production.

Camille Philippon

Ève Gabriel Chabanon

Title The Surplus of the Non-Producer Date 2018 – 2020

Materials HD video

Dimensions 47 minutes 28 secondes

Acquisition date 2018

The installation The Surplus of the Non-Producer comprises a series of works, see p. 62 Exhibitions Ève Chabanon. Chapter 4: Sold, Beursschouwburg, Brussels from 22 Apr. to 04 Sep. 2021 Chapter 3, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster from 11 Jul. to 04 Oct. 2020

Le surplus, Bétonsalon, Paris from 29 Jan. to 25 Apr. 2020

Since 2017, The Surplus of the Non-Producer has travelled to a number of venues, from art centres to high schools, disseminating along the way a practice of “commoning” that challenges the norms and habits of institutional praxis. Working with and through the plurality of the assembly, Ève Gabriel Chabanon invites us to question the conditions and politics of cultural work. The Surplus of the NonProducer continued to test its modes of assembly, inhabiting, indebtedness, and spatialization at and beyond the margins in Le Surplus at Bétonsalon, Paris (2020); Chapter 3 at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2020); and Chapter 4: Sold at the Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2021). A solution then emerged: a greater practice of failure. From workshops to exhibitions, from contract negotiations to collective translations, Ève Chabanon has modelled The Surplus as a loose yet constant whole.

Étienne Chambaud

Date and place of birth: 1980, Mulhouse, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Étienne Chambaud explores the creative process and the nature of the work of art: he questions the immanence of the artwork, emphasising the contextual aspect of creation. The notions of reference and intertextuality thus motivate the production of many of his works as well as providing the keys to their understanding, which he supports with titles and captions.

Born in 1980 in Mulhouse, Étienne Chambaud studied at the ECAL in Lausanne, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Lyon, the Villa Arson in Nice, and the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Les Larmes (exclusion de la tautologie #7)

Date 2008

Materials Plexiglas, wood, water, plastic

Dimensions 15 × 15 × 15 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Objet de tendresse, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 05 to 17 Apr. 2018

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

The meaning of Les Larmes (exclusion de la tautologie #7) stems from the dialogue maintained with the other works that make up its environment, thus becoming porous to its context of display. The title and nature of this readymade—a bottle of fake tears—underline an ambiguity about the sincerity of emotions, highlighting the roleplaying that drives our social behaviour. These artificial tears seem to be saying that affection is not always a pure and unsimulated feeling of kindness. Étienne Chambaud’s work is constantly developing to gradually draw the contours of a constellation of common references. It functions like a page on which a multitude of images and ideas which appear as each viewer’s mind wanders. Étienne Chambaud pursues a demanding reflection on the nature of the work of art, on the relationships it maintains with other works, and on the contexts and reasons for the appearance of objects, whether they are charged with meaning or with a particular narrative. His works retain the trace of a previous work while proposing a new composition, oscillating endlessly between an inescapable repetition and the opening up of a constantly renewed horizon.

Gaëlle Choisne

Date and place of birth: 1985, Cherbourg, France Lives and works between Paris, France and Berlin, Germany

Influenced by Creole esoteric traditions, myths, and popular culture, Gaëlle Choisne's work is rooted in issues of contemporary ecology and colonial history. She is particularly interested in the question of domination and the need to pay tribute to the victims of slavery and colonisation, and more broadly to minority and “invisible” communities.

Born in Cherbourg in 1985, Gaëlle Choisne is a Franco-Haitian artist who studied at the École des Beaux-arts in Lyon and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She has been exhibited in several institutions and was awarded the AWARE prize in the Emerging Artist category in 2021. She now lives between Paris and Berlin.

Title Ego, he goes (Fridge selfspeech and shine love consciousness - Period!)

Date 2021

Materials Metal, etched and pigmented acrylic resin, sound system, ceramics, photographs and found documents, magnets, printed wooden case, speaker, LED, aluminium laminate, wood and glass frame

Dimensions 193 × 110 × 70 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Art Basel 2022, Art Basel, Bâle (Suisse) from 16 Jun. to 19 Jun. 2022

Triennal: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, New York from 28 Oct. 2021 to 23 Feb. 2022

In this audio installation featuring an open refrigerator, Gaëlle Choisne engages the viewer by inviting them to study the products it contains, and by desacralising the work of art through the sculpture’s functional aspect. This “material storytelling”, to use the artist’s own words, in which different materials coexist, serves both to denounce capitalism and consumer society through waste, and to recall Gaëlle Choisne's roots and her local involvement, particularly with photographs of Haiti. As for the work’s humorous title, it is in keeping with the artist's interest in the theme of love, such as in Temple of Love, a project inspired by the writings of Roland Barthes.

Louise Glodt-Chauchoy

Claude Closky

Date and place of birth: 1963, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Title Authorities step up

Date 2023

Materials Coloured paper, glue

Dimensions 21 × 29,7 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions

Claude Closky

Title Ennemy is in shock Date 2023

Materials Coloured paper, glue

Dimensions 21 × 29,7 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions

Title The world is getting less Date 2023

Materials Coloured paper, glue

Dimensions 21 × 29,7 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions

Peter Coffin

Date and place of birth: 1972, Berkeley, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Peter Coffin’s protean work is based on photography, video, and drawing. The artist also creates installations and produces music. Through his interest in epistemology, he likes to challenge science by exploring alternative logics and irrational ways of thinking. He often works on optical phenomena in works that play with the viewer’s sensory perceptions by inviting them to look at banal objects from a new, often playful and poetic angle. A lover of pastiche, he regularly calls on references from art history that he appropriates and reinterprets.

Title Untitled (Log with Model of the Universe)

Date 2005

Materials Tree trunk, spotlights, plastic

Dimensions

76.2 × 76.2 × 152.4 cm (old trunk), 110 × 145 × 110 cm (new trunk)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Antidote 7, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 06 Oct. 2011 to 07 Jan. 2012

DEAF « From the audible to the visible », Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris from 18 Mar. to 29 Apr. 2006

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Through works of various forms, Peter Coffin shows an interest in science and its more or less serious derivatives. His conceptual and cross-disciplinary practice questions sensory perceptions and its limits, offering alternative ways of knowing and representing the world that are more experimental and intuitive. Untitled (Log with Model of the Universe) thus recomposes a mathematical and physical allegory of the universe in which the third dimension is symbolized by a hollow tree trunk, while the rotating light beams of a discotheque convey the fourth dimension. This reinterpretation, at once trivial and playful, of a scientific concept contributes to the development of a joyous and personal cosmogony.

Peter Coffin

Title Untitled (Auric Outline, Liz)

Date 2007

Materials Wall

Dimensions 170 × 75 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Untitled (Auric Outline, Liz) presents a figure whose contours are drawn on the corner of a wall with seven coloured lines. The figure is slightly tilted, as if it is trying to look behind the wall without being seen. The work contains several recurring motifs in Peter Coffin’s work: the silhouette, which he often uses to suggest forms, and the colours of the rainbow, which also evoke the spectrum of light. This work, which reflects the artist’s taste for pseudoscience, refers to an esoteric concept popularized by the New Age movement, the adjective auric being associated with the aura, the luminous field that supposedly surrounds the body. Here the artist plays on the boundary between visible and invisible: the figure hidden behind the wall is seen by the viewer through its aura, supposedly imperceptible and decomposed according to the colours of the visible spectrum.

Romane Grouille

Delphine Coindet

Date and place of birth: 1969, Albertville, France

Lives and works in Lausanne, Suisse

Delphine Coindet draws computer-based prototypes or “mental schematics” (Philippe Régnier), then calls on specialised craftsmen to translate them from the virtual to the real. She handles abstract and figurative forms, materials of different—even opposing—natures, whose confrontation creates new worlds. She challenges the viewer’s perception, awakens their imagination, and provokes mental projections through assemblages that are sometimes surprising and which are in turn affected by the experience of the viewer.

Title On Edge

Date 2005

Materials Wood laminate, mirror, ostrich feather boa

Dimensions 70 × 70 × 70 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Midnight Walkers, Le Crédac, Ivry-Sur-Seine from 21 Jan. to 26 Mar. 2006

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Delphine Coindet & Wilfrid Almendra from 30 Jun. to 10 Sep. 2005

At first glance, On Edge is a boa with bright blue feathers that appears to be floating, when in fact it is lying on a parallelepiped whose material reflects the space surrounding it. These two objects conceal and reveal each other by disturbing our gaze. The geometric rigidity is confronted with the softness and sensuality of the boa. Through a certain theatricality, this assemblage interacts with the space where it is located and with those who encounter it. As the work is constantly changing, an infinite number of images can be applied to it. This restlessness is the strength of Delphine Coindet’s work, thwarting norms and conventions, in particular those of a certain masculinity associated with minimal art, by imposing “the notion of doubt as a value in itself”, in the words of the artist.

Camille

Philippon

Delphine Coindet

Title Dear M.

Date 2008

Materials Machine-tool, Plexiglas

Dimensions 135 × 180 × 80 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

POP UP Truck, Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 04 Jun. 2016

Encore une fois, Domaine de Chamarande, Chamarande from 26 Oct. 2008 to 15 Feb. 2009

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Polyamid Spirit, Evergreene, Geneva from 13 Mar. to 10 May 2008

Delphine Coindet conceives her works with a computerassisted design programme, then turns to specialized artisans to make them. She considers her productions, which are formally rather purified, as “potentialities”, or machine capable of producing “relations”. Thus, she places the viewer in the position of author, adopting a point of view close to that of Jacques Derrida who suggested, in his 1967 publication Of Grammatology, that a literary work, once printed, is endowed with perpetual and increased meaning by a community of readers. Dear M., the title of which is an anagram of the word “dream”, can refer equally to a mirror, movement, machine, manipulation, motor, or even metal, a structural element of contemporary dreams and nightmares.

Isabelle Cornaro

Date and place of birth: 1974, Aurillac, France

Lives and works between Paris, France and Geneva, Switzerland

Isabelle Cornaro’s creative process is based on an equilibrium between the object and conceptual art. Her minimal compositions are a personal interpretation of landscapes or structures that she deconstructs to question our perceptions. She plays with her sensitivity and subjectivity, but tones them down by proposing a rational classification. Her work thus tends to move away from formal and aesthetic considerations towards an approach of systematic classification. Isabelle Cornaro positions herself at the antithesis of pop culture by seeking to physically and visually occupy spaces that are still empty. The creative means through which the artist projects herself into the world is thus the conjunction of material components, aesthetic properties, and her positioning in a constantly proliferating universe of objects.

Born in 1974 in Aurillac, Isabelle Cornaro graduated in art history from the École du Louvre in 1996 and from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in 2002. She also studied at the Royal College of Arts in London. She lives and works between Paris and Geneva.

Title Fields surrounding Turin, conjunction of a horizon and an echo chamber

Date 2006

Materials Paper, hair

Dimensions 80 × 149 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Isabelle Cornaro transforms an Italian landscape in a minimalist way using two mediums. Fields surrounding Turin, conjunction of a horizon and an echo chamber consists of a series of vertical strips of white paper into which are inserted thin strands of twisted human hair. These map topographical elements reduced to a few curves arranged in space. The contrast between the whiteness of the landscape-format paper and the tactile materiality of the hair gives this work a poetic character. Like musical notes placed on a blank score, the curls evoke a certain sensuality that borders on sentimentality. Here, Isabelle Cornaro demonstrates the ambivalence between concrete and conceptual. Removing objects, such as these cut locks from their usual function transforms the way they are perceived. The artist seeks to put them within reach, but by severing the hair from its root, she turns it into an allegory that describes an abstract relationship to the world, echoing the question of narrative evoked by continuous processes of composition and recomposition. The action here becomes movements and oscillations in the wind of the Italian fields.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

Isabelle Cornaro

Title Black Maria (Phenomena Overwhelming Consciousness)

Date 2008

Materials Pigment prints, projection of black-and-white slides

Dimensions 80 × 60 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Black Maria (Phenomena Overwhelming Consciousness) is an installation of slides taken from a book by the artist. The title refers to Thomas Edison’s film production studio, the Kinetographic Theater, known as “Black Maria”. The work consists of landscape photographs in which a female figure gradually appears through a progressive zooming in on the focal point and (digitally reproduced) drawings that make its schematic lines visible. Black Maria highlights the artist’s interest in the construction of space and its composition within a work, but also her analysis of systems of representation. The antagonisms generated by the encounter between figuration and abstraction, composition and decomposition, reveal complex links and call into question “the construction of the gaze” through the “deconstruction of frames of reference”.

Camille Philippon

Anne-Lise Coste

Date and place of birth: 1973, Marseille, France

Lives and works in Orthoux, France

Anne-Lise Coste’s paintings and drawings have the immediacy of graffiti. Having made spray painting her favourite tool, spontaneity and speed of gesture are at the heart of her practice. Influenced by the Dada movement and its art of revolt, her work combines personal emotions and public criticism of society. Her highly varied work conveys a subjective perception of the world, open to the collective, which materialises the contemporary anxieties of our daily lives.

Born in 1973 in Marseille, Anne-Lise Coste was trained at the École des Beaux-arts de Marseille and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zurich. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, notably in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Anne-Lise Coste lives and works in Orthoux in Southern France

Title Cannibale

Date 2003

Materials

Dimensions

Made with spray paint, Cannibale is presented as graffiti transposed onto paper. The wall is replaced by a blank sheet of paper, but Anne-Lise Coste retains the airbrush and the aesthetics of graffiti to write the word cannibale in capital letters, a technique that allows her to adopt a gesture combining immediacy, speed, and spontaneity. Through her practice, the artist also proceeds to a deconstruction of language. She takes words apart, isolates them and presents them as “visual phenomena,” dissolving the distinction between word and image. Thus detached from its signifier, Cannibale materialises an interjection and a statement formulated by the artist which is open to the spectator. The subjective emotion translated by this gesture is combined with a public critique by initiating a shift from the intimate to the collective.

Suzana Danilovic

Anne-Lise Coste

Title Orange Date 2005

Materials Spray paint on canvas

Dimensions 130 × 95 cm (work) 135 × 100 × 3.5 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Orange’s intertwining spirals were spray-painted on a sheet of paper. These movable graffiti motifs are mixed with drips that seem to want to escape the frame of the page. In the centre, the letter «C» can be made out, embedded in an infinite arborescence. The work comes out of the urban art scene, whose conventions the artist uses, in the manner of a plant proliferating in the interstices of a wall and pushing back its limits. The spontaneity and dynamism of the emancipatory gesture carry a certain sense of freedom which Anne-Lise Coste underlines. These patterns reveal the broader, allencompassing structures of the institutional system that she challenges and invites us to reflect on as individuals.

Camille Philippon

François-Xavier Courrèges

Date and place of birth: 1974, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

François-Xavier Courrèges explores the themes of sensitivity, feelings, and memory through different mediums. He highlights the joys and burdens of love in order to develop an art of intimacy which he displaces. He positions himself in the void between a society that values happiness and loyalty, and a system where even demonstrations of love are part of a financial economy. He often uses the symbols of childhood as a language in order to “restore the human dimension of our impulses.” He develops an aesthetics of emotion through which to delicately touch the viewer.

Title Fusion

Date 2003

Materials Video

Dimensions 14 minutes

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

A fourteen-minute video made by François-Xavier Courrèges in 2003, Fusion shows a candle bearing the effigy of Ernest and Bart, two characters from The Muppets, spinning in slow motion in front of a coloured paper background. The birthday candle and multicoloured decor evoke a joyful pop world associated with childhood, but the repetition of a musical loop gives the video a tragic storyline tone as the wax liquefies and the characters burn up before the viewer’s eyes. With the simplest of means François-Xavier Courrèges succeeds in developing a reflection on our vulnerability to time. By cultivating a post-romanticism between dismay and amusement, the artist accurately evokes feelings of love and the fragility of beings. Fusion recalls another film entitled Another Paradise (2005) showing two birds in love that nothing seems to be able to separate beyond death.

Rosanne Moulin

François-Xavier Courrèges

Title The Future’s Rapture II (J.C. avril 2006)

Date 2006

Materials Paper, watercolour paint

Dimensions 65 × 50 cm (each work) 70 × 55 × 3 cm (each framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

François-Xavier Courrèges’s works resonate with each other, forming a fabric that connects the human dimension of our impulses while developing over time through the creative process. The diluted aspect of the watercolour that the artist uses here echoes the recurrent use of slow motion in his videos. This aesthetic choice gives his creations a fantastical and poetic dimension. The Future’s Rapture II (J.C. avril 2006) takes on a more cinematographic reality through a futuristic vision that expresses an expectation and a desire. The title Future’s Rapture II is a religious reference that evokes the faithful’s hope to travel to paradise after death. The diptych format of these two framed watercolours on paper allows for the presentation of several emotions, between personal projection and collective history. The sober portrait with its soft green hue and piercing gaze seems to express the expectation, attention, even the tension directed towards this delicate rose with its ghostly aspect which seems to be within reach, bending towards the subject’s delicate forehead, without hiding either the beauty of its petals or the danger of its thorns. Will passion and suffering be able to give themselves away before the afterlife?

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

June Crespo

Date and place of birth: 1982, Pamplona, Spain

Lives and works in Bilbao, Spain

Title Acts of pulse (1)

Date 2022

Materials Bronze, stainless steel, leather, textile

Dimensions 266 × 43 × 73 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions June Crespo: Vascular, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain), from 01 March to 09 June 2024

L’écorce, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (France) from 15 Oct. 2023 to 14 Jan. 2024

Julien Creuzet

Date and place of birth: 1986, Le Blanc-Mesnil, France Lives and works in Montreuil, France

Julien Creuzet is a visual artist, performer, poet, and filmmaker who explores different media. He sees all forms of creation as complementary, particularly in an exhibition space where multiple media meet. His work focuses on issues of cultural heritage, colonization, migration, and the way they influence individuals and their identity.

Born in 1986 in Le Blanc-Mesnil (France), Julien Creuzet now lives and works in Montreuil. After graduating from the École des Beaux-arts de Caen, Julien Creuzet continued his studies at the École des Beaux-arts de Lyon and at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.

Title Coiffes

Date 2016

Materials HD video

Dimensions 14 minutes 20 seconds

Acquisition date 2017

The work is part of the installation Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue), see p. 80

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Ricochets considers the colonial division of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1885 as a key to understanding contemporary terrorism. It revisits that moment of upheaval and its ripple effects in history and in space, materialised, for example, by the European flag torn into pieces. Elsewhere in the installation, we find the same concern with revealing causalities with “macro” consequences. The use of rice in the sculptures highlights the tension between its value as food, its widespread consumption and low cost, and the ecological and speculative threats to which it is subject, which could starve the world’s population. Here and there, amulets and antidotes—lightly magnetised forks and Quinton ampoules (pure seawater)—counterbalance these butterfly effects of a historical, geopolitical, and social nature.

Julien Creuzet

Title Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue)

Date 2017

Materials Plane wing, bird of paradise flowers

Dimensions 33 × 472 × 208 cm (plane wing)

Acquisition date 2017

The installation Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue) comprises a series of works, see p. 79, 81, 82 and 83

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Julien Creuzet’s œuvre considers the colonial partitioning of Africa at the 1885 Berlin conference as key to understanding modern-day terrorism. It revisits that moment of upheaval and its ripple effects in the context of history and space, materialized, for example, by the European flag torn up in pieces. Elsewhere in the installation, we find the same concern with revealing causalities with “macro” consequences. The use of rice in his sculptures reveals the tension between the foodstuff’s nutritional value, widespread consumption, low cost and the ecological and speculative dangers associated with it that could lead to global starvation. Here and there, amulets and antidotes – forks turned into weak magnets and vials of Quinton (purified sea water) – counterbalance these butterfly effects of natural, geopolitical and social history.

Julien Creuzet

Title Amalia-Fri-Mason

Date 2017

Materials HD video

Dimensions 6 minutes 4 seconds

Acquisition date 2017

The work is part of the installation Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue), see p. 79

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Title Mono, farine de France, famine du monde, vital, culture. Ils coulent. Nous confondons le riz, le sable recouvrant le sang et l’huile de palme. Ils tirent. Écologique, énergétique, numérique. Agro, accro. Ils tirent, ils foncent sur la foule, ils coulent, ils tirent, ils échouent. Déçu des champs vides ravagés par les chenilles légionnaires. Eux aussi migrent, fuient les rives. Dieu-argent, Dieu-soleil, Dieu-miel. Ils tirent, bouleversés. Ultime zone de survie, ronde bleu partagée. Argent, sale travail. Faut-il parler de la tragédie grecque. Mono, robot, Donald. Monoculture, enflure, futur désert. Ils pleurent. Présidentielles. Ils meurent des fièvres pestilentielles. Mono, rocket, gros con, robot, cimetière de la mer. Agro, ils coulent, accro.

Date 2017

Materials Flag, bed base, plastic, fabric, cable, shoe, rice, carpet, fork, T-shirt

Dimensions 16 × 214 × 155 cm (installation) 0.5 × 214 × 99 cm (flag)

12 × 80 × 42 cm (blue carpet) 5 × 190 × 81 cm (bed base)

1 × 50 × 68 cm (flowers) 12 × 80 × 45 cm (fork sculpture)

Acquisition date 2018

The work is part of the installation Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue), see p. 79

Amalia-Fri-Mason (2017) is part of a process of questioning history. This hybrid work, which combines video, poetry, and song, is part of the installation Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue). This work is driven by Julien Creuzet’s exploration of the colonial division of Africa, which he sees as the breeding ground for contemporary terrorism. Following the example of Aliha Kama (2017), a work which is part of the same installation, Amalia-Fri-Mason deals more specifically with the theme of the integration or exclusion of the “other” in society, a subject that is partly autobiographical, since Creuzet drew inspiration from the experiences of some of his relations. The metaphor “I was digested, a little longer ago, and that is my integration” expresses a slow and painful integration following immigration. Amalia-Fri-Mason thus refers to issues of migration, a recurrent theme in Creuzet’s work.

Julie Robin

These three works, which are part of an installation entitled Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue), can function separately or together. The titles of these pieces refer to Julien Creuzet’s poem Ricochets. The same elements are found in each composition: the mattress filled with rice or a piece of the European flag. Only the ancillary components of the works vary. The mattresses evoke something hard and dark, such as recumbents and tombs, an impression reinforced by the pieces of torn flag that seem to have been placed in a hurry. The use of rice is very symbolic for the artist: it is the most consumed food in the world and a staple for many people, particularly the poorest. Through this work, he also explores the events that led to the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris, in this case the division of Africa at the Berlin conference in 1885. The fragmented flag also represents the separation of the continent into colonies. According to Julien Creuzet, modern terrorism is the consequence of colonization. Through this installation, the artist explores facts that may seem distant, but whose consequences are still being felt today, like ricochets.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris,

Julien Creuzet

Title Nous allons fuir, dans un immense enclos, nous allons tourner en rond. Encore une fois, ce sera une fin, et à nouveau un départ. Nous allons rebondir, ricochet, jusqu’au bout de nos forces. Nous allons vivre nos vies d’hommes, avec nos temporalité d’hommes, nous être une courte étape. Sensible bourrasque. Frêles et fertiles, faibles et vaniteux, on aurait dû prendre exemple sur les fourmis folles. Terre rebond, nous finirons par couler.

Date 2016

Materials Wood, bottle, water, seawater, fork, magnet, cable, jeans, plastic, hydrangea, fabrics, rice, shoe

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2017

The work is part of the installation Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue), see p. 79

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Julien Creuzet

Title Où est Ménaka, la belle rouge, aimée des hommes bleus. Les blancs après avoir dessiné les contours des terres noires, ont donné ton nom de Touareg à une Néo-voiture qui tient la route sur les déserts de goudron. Désinvolture dans les lointains austraux. Dictature se règle à l’arme Russe. Remontrance autoritaire, leurs affaires, mes affaires, la guerre. Enterrer la hache de guerre et hâter le processus de paix.

Date 2017

Materials Flag, bed base, plastic, fabric, cable, shoe, rice, carpet, Kalashnikov

Dimensions 16 × 214 × 155 cm (installation) 0.5 × 226 × 100 cm (flag)

1 × 32 × 73 cm (carpet) 7 × 190 × 73.5 cm (bed base)

13 × 56 × 16 cm (flowers) 16 × 89 × 28 cm (Kalashnikov)

Acquisition date 2018

The work is part of the installation Ricochets, les galets que nous sommes finiront par couler (Épilogue), see p. 79

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Based on his own experience and observations, and that of those close to him, in Aliha Kama Julien Creuzet develops a story about the foreigner. The process of integration of migrants lies at the heart of his work. In the course of a three-minute sung poem, the video develops a reflection on the relationship between the individual, their history, and their home, as summed up by this sentence taken from the work: “Where are we here, where is the we in me?”

Julie Robin

Title Aliha Kama

Abraham Cruzvillegas

Date and place of birth: 1968, Mexico

Lives and works in Paris, France

His work, whether performative, sculptural, or pictorial, is the very expression of human reality: unstable, raw, unpredictable but also powerful, evolving, and dynamic. A fundamental principle in Abraham Cruzvillegas’s work is the idea of autoconstrucción, inspired by his experiences of life in the Ajusco district of Mexico City, where he grew up. Through the practice of recycling and adapting materials for unconventional purposes, he creates works that act as metaphors of the processes by which we construct our identities.

Abraham Cruzvillegas lives and works in Paris where he teaches sculpture at the École des Beaux-arts.

Title Self Constructed Upside Down Shelter

Date 2017

Materials Plaster, copper

Dimensions 120 × 250 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Mappa mundi – Cartographies contemporaines Fondation Boghossian – Villa Empain, Brussels from 05 Mar. to 22 Aug. 2020

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Self Constructed Upside Down Shelter proposes a geographic representation born of the unlikely combination of copper and plaster: the work is a map of the world turned upside down, erasing all borders. In this surprising spatiality, where South becomes North, a new balance emerges, enabling the redefinition of flows and exchanges.

François Curlet

Date and place of birth: 1967, Paris, France

Lives and works between Paris, France and Brussels, Belgium

François Curlet bases his artistic practice on the ironic and subtle appropriation of everyday objects to create poetic and strange worlds where references to popular culture, the industrial era, and Belgian artistic culture collide. He defines himself as a “spaghetti conceptualist,” in a nod to the evolution of the classic western into the spaghetti western, thus placing his work under the sign of the absurd and self-mockery.

Born in 1967 in Paris, François Curlet studied at the Beaux-arts of Saint-Étienne and Grenoble, then at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in Brussels. He currently lives and works between Paris, the Camargue, and Brussels.

Title Projet d’architecture fainéante

Date 2003

Materials Plaster, wood, tree, sleeping bag, table, trestles

Dimensions 86 × 200 × 63 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Play Time, Biennale d’art contemporain de Rennes, Rennes from 27 Sep. to 30 Nov. 2014

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Airs de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris from 25 Apr. to 15 Aug. 2007

Architecture fainéante [dessins et maquettes]

Centre Culturel Français de Turin, Turin from 05 Mar. to 07 Apr. 2007

Projet d’architecture fainéante is both a group of sculptures and a group of models which form the architectural project which François Curlet has been developing since 2003. The artist suggests building shelters or dwellings from the top and not from the bottom, thus proposing a quick and easy-to-build prototype of the habitat of the future. The four models presented on this trestle table are possible typologies for these different nomadic habitats, but more than a method of construction, this “lazy architecture” is also a principle: the artist effaces himself behind chance and the force of gravity, all-powerful creative principles that govern the different models’ soft forms. Laziness becomes the art of doing nothing (as suggested by the sleeping bag on the floor), or rather of letting it happen, since it is the fast-setting plaster used by François Curlet that, as it flows, creates the shapes and reliefs of these hybrid objects.

Marianne Tricoire

François Curlet

Title Original storyboard for Jonathan Livingston

Date 2012

Materials Wash, paper

Dimensions 29.7 × 21 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Fugu, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 27 Feb. to 20 May 2013

Title Jonathan Livingston (poster)

Date 2012

Materials Six-colour silkscreen print

Dimensions 176 × 120 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

This suite of twenty-one paper plates constitutes the storyboard for Jonathan Livingstone, a short film by François Curlet in which the artist stages one of his works entitled Speed Limit, the coming together of a Jaguar E-Type and a hearse welded together in the middle. The film follows the wanderings of an undertaker in a white shirt and tailcoat through the deserted countryside in his strange vehicle which he comes close to crashing several times in his quest for speed— ironically as if he is already in a vehicle anticipating the possibility of his demise. Both a racing and a death machine, this hybrid car may also recall Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, with its killer chasing innocent victims in his black car, with a similar form of funereal humour.

Marianne Tricoire

This poster was created by the M/M Paris graphic design studio, which regularly collaborates with many contemporary artists and European art institutions. It presents Jonathan Livingstone, a short film by François Curlet showing the wanderings of an undertaker in a white shirt and tailcoat through a deserted countryside in a hybrid car which is represented in the background: the coming together of a Jaguar E-Type and a hearse which are welded together in the middle. The lone undertaker comes close to crashing several times in his quest for speed— ironically as if he is already in a vehicle anticipating the possibility of his demise. The grinning feline emblazoned on the spokes of a wheel in the foreground could be a reference to the famous car brand Jaguar, but in a disturbing version that adds to the strangeness of the piece.

Marianne Tricoire

François Curlet

Title Jonathan Livingston

Date 2012

Materials HD video

Dimensions 8 minutes

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Fugu, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 27 Feb. to 20 May 2013

This short film features a work by François Curlet entitled Speed Limit, the coming together of a Jaguar E-Type and a hearse welded together in the middle in reference to Hal Ashby’s cult comedy-drama Harold and Maude. The film follows the wanderings of an undertaker in a white shirt and tailcoat through the deserted countryside in his strange vehicle which he comes close to crashing several times in his quest for speed— ironically as if he is already in a vehicle anticipating the possibility of his demise. Both a racing and a death machine, this hybrid car may also recall Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, with its killer chasing innocent victims in his black car, with a similar form of funereal humour.

Marianne Tricoire

Natalie Czech

Date and place of birth: 1976, Neuss, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Natalie Czech’s practice combines photography and writing to reveal the links between visible and invisible as well as between image and text. To this end, she summons different characters who come together through writing, guided by protocols, ranging from literary references to contemporary guests from the world of culture. As a true cultural interpreter, the artist uses repetition, which she calls “stuttering”, and intertextuality, which she stages to identify the modes of representation of reality in literature. Reactivated by the experience of visitors, her works are inscribed in different temporalities, from the direct relationship to the image to the variable duration of their reading.

Title Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire

Date 2014

Materials Acrylic paint

Dimensions 85.5 × 54.8 × 41.1 cm (each)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions

One can’t have it both ways and both way is the only way I want it

CRAC Alsace, Altkirch from 16 Jun. to 18 Sep. 2016

Sighs Trapped by Liars – Sprache in der Kunst

KM - Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz from 12 Mar. to 29 May 2016

Friends with books, ART BOOK FAIR, Berlin from 11 to 13 Dec. 2015

Reloaded – Konkrete Tendenzen heute

Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen, Bremen from 22 May to 30 Aug. 2015

41st FIAC, Le Grand Palais, Paris from 23 to 26 Oct. 2014

Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire is a photographic installation that brings together the texts of five authors invited by the artist (Amilcar Packer, Derek Beaulieu, Jacques Roubaud, Shane Anderson, and Vincenzo Latronico). These texts evoking the rain were commissioned in their mother tongues. The artist inserted Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligram entitled Il Pleut (1916). She then highlighted it with acrylic paint to bring out the design of the drops running over the writings, which she photographed on different coloured backgrounds. Illustrating the subject of the text, the motif underlines the question of semantics and the images generated by reading. By creating new ones through the orchestration of a profusion of words, the images are infinitely reproduced, appearing for some and disappearing for others in the intimacy of their own representations.

Camille

Philippon

Jesse Darling

Date and place of birth: 1981, Oxford, United Kingdom

Lives and works between London, United Kingdom and Berlin, Germany

Through their artistic approach, Jesse Darling questions the fallible structures of societies and organizations whose decline is inevitable. In this sense, the artist is particularly interested in fungibility, that is to say things that are consumed and disappear before being replaced by something else of the same nature. Their work is replete with cultural and religious references that allow us to question the place of beings and their bodies in society. Jesse Darling develops their reflections through various creations composed of installations, sculptures, or texts.

Born in 1981, Oxford, Jesse Darling lives and works between London and Berlin.

Sometimes suspended on top of steel crutches, sometimes inserted in a display cabinet whose legs buckle under the weight of their load, ring binders are a strong marker in Jesse Darling’s work. In the case of Untitled, the installation isolates these binders from any other association. Scattered, as if thrown haphazardly, they go against the notions of order and tidiness that are intrinsically associated with them. Because they are not labelled, these binders leave the public wondering about their contents. The sheets that should be inserted in them are replaced by concrete blocks. Impossible to move and deviated from their primary use, the binders create an image of a fallible and dysfunctional society. The administrative norms that govern the world are here opaque and overwhelming. Jesse Darling’s work, in their own words, invites us to recognize “the weight behind things assigned a certain lightness.” The binders, images of order and categorization, have been shattered.

Audrey Pellerin

Franck David

Date and place of birth: 1966, Montreuil, France

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Franck David is mainly inspired by everyday objects that he appropriates by retaining only one detail. In the absence of an apparent narrative, his diverse work composed of installations and audiovisual devices is as enigmatic as it is confusing. Each of his creations—an artist who refuses all labels—has a different aesthetic: a deliberate heterogeneity that aims to raise questions for the viewer. This appropriation of everyday elements leads us into a universe that is both familiar and unknown, and which disturbs our perception of and relationship with the world.

Title Week-end

Date 2003

Materials Chrome car bonnets

Dimensions 134 × 101 cm (each)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Pause, FRAC - Normandie Rouen, Sotteville-lès-Rouen from 18 Apr. to 23 Aug. 2009

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Esses, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 09 Jul. to 02 Aug. 2003

Week-end is an installation consisting of two life-size chrome car bonnets mounted side by side on a wall. As they are removed from their original context and visibly damaged, their original function is permanently lost. The shocks that have deformed them introduce the notions of fragility and disappearance. Through these two bonnets, which are precisely the same, Franck David evokes a contradictory mastery of the accident. The perplexity caused by this discordance is accentuated by the title of the work, Week-end, which seems inappropriate. As is often the case in the artist’s work, the object is fragmented, isolated from its environment. Displaced and modified in this way, its evocative potential is increased rather than diminished, and thus gives rise to various poetic or philosophical interpretations in the viewer’s imagination.

Margaux Granier

Jean-Charles de Quillacq

Date and place of birth: 1979, Parthenay, France

Lives and works between Zurich, Switzerland, Paris and the Limousin, France

Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s sculptural and performative practice is rooted in the representation and deconstruction of the human body. The artist enjoys moulding it, fragmenting it, and exploring its erotic capacity. He most often works with malleable resin that he models himself and sometimes mixes with his own body fluids.

Born in 1979 in Parthenay, Jean-Charles de Quillacq studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Lyon and at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin. He was resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2011 and one of the winners of the Swiss Art Awards in 2017. He currently lives and works between Zurich, Paris, and the Limousin.

Title Copie-moi

Date 2019

Materials Aluminium, acrylic resin, plastic

Dimensions 80 × 96 × 42 cm

Acquisition date 2020

Exhibitions Autofonction, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris from 16 May to 25 Jul. 2020

Ma système reproductive, Bétonsalon, Paris from 03 May to 13 Jul. 2019

This bent tubular skeleton supports the fragments of a dislocated, fragmented, and almost grotesquely helpless body. It is a cast of the artist’s legs, a recurring motif in his work, which he made using epoxy resin. This sculpture seems to express his ambivalent feelings about the body as an object: “There is something in the body that cannot be grasped (...) Kneading it, replicating it, multiplying it does not change anything. It is always impossible to completely comprehend it.” One cannot ignore the fetishistic or potentially erotic dimension implied by the undone trousers, especially as the artist often coats his sculptures with various fluids (grease, oils, shampoo) when they are exhibited. Its enigmatic title (“copy me”) is a direct appeal to the viewer, perhaps in an evocation of the sculpture casts used as a support for academic drawing, or so as to question the processes of copying and duplication at work in contemporary art.

Marianne Tricoire

Koenraad Dedobbeleer

Date and place of birth: 1976, Halle, Belgium Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Koenraad Dedobbeleer has been producing sculptures, installations, photographs, and publications since the late 1990s. Winner of the Mies van der Rohe prize in 2009, he is also an exhibition curator and coeditor of the fanzine UP. His sculptures make use of everyday objects, which the artist questions by rethinking their proportions in relation to their possible value. Displaced into an exhibition context and stripped of their function, these objects become material for interpretation. The titles of his works are also thought-provoking, as they are never directly related to the object they designate. The artist thus plays with the common reflex of wanting to explain a work by its title.

By integrating the usual presentation device—in this case, the tree-trunk-like plinth—into the work In the Cold and Stupefying Air the Statues Sleep, Koenraad Dedobbeleer blurs the boundaries commonly drawn between the everyday object and the sacredness of an artwork. Through this hybridity of the artefact, he is engaging in a form of relational aesthetics. The titles of his works are also thought-provoking, as they are never directly related to the object they designate. Koenraad Dedobbeleer thus plays with the common reflex of wanting to explain a work by its title and its connections with closely related objects.

In the Cold and Stupefying Air the Statues Sleep

Koenraad Dedobbeleer

Title Suppressed, Underestimated and Falsified Role

Date 2014

Materials Wood, painted metal

Dimensions 95 × 44 × 39 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions The Desperate, Furiously Positive Striving of People Who Refuse to Be Dismissed, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp from 05 Apr. to 25 May 2014

Suppressed, Underestimated and Falsified Role may look like a chair, but it is nothing of the sort: Koenraad Dedobbeleer borrows formal codes from everyday objects in order to hijack and dismantle them. Like a decoy, his sculpture disrupts the cohesion of words and things, but unlike the grapes of Zeuxis, there is no mistaking it: the use of the object is undermined in order to better question our capacity for sensory understanding and our ability to know within the framework of an episteme specific to a culture and an era. Within the system of fine arts, Koenraad Dedobbeleer questions the classification of things in order to better underline the porosity of the artificially established limits and to show their perpetual renewal, an obstacle to the temptation of the simplistic nature of the imaginary.

Chloé Delarue

Date and place of birth: 1986, Le Chesnay, France Lives and works in Châtelaine, Switzerland

Chloé Delarue observes the mechanisms of production of the artificial in the age of computational thinking and their effects on our modes of representation. In particular, she reflects on the idea of total automation, considering the disturbances and aberrations that infiltrate our perceptions as simulated territories expand. Her installations and sculptures, in which she deploys decoy effects, pretence, and camouflage, surround a dense environment with a vast series of works under the acronym TAFAA (Toward A Fully Automated Appearance), an evolving cycle which gives form to the ambiguities and paradoxes of this world affected by its own replication.

Born in 1986 in Le Chesnay (France), Chloé Delarue is a graduate of the Villa Arson in Nice (2012) and the Haute école d’art et de design in Geneva (2014). She currently lives in Geneva.

Title TAFAA - FERTILITY DEVICE (NUDGE FOR THE SCAPEGOAT)

Date 2021

Materials Stainless steel, neon, resin, chrome, motor, latex, cigarettes, LCD screen, LED, video, transformer

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Swiss Media Art: Marc Lee, Chloé Delarue, Laurent Güdel, Hek, Basel from 12 Feb. to 24 May 2022

Issue de secours, BINZ 39, Zurich from 20 May to 19 Jun. 2021

TAFAA - FERTILITY DEVICE (NUDGE FOR THE SCAPEGOAT) is a sculpture that draws on various elements and materials that recur in Chloé Delarue’s work to bring about new speculative scenarios. In front of an inactive screen, we are faced with our own reflection. Behind it is a cast of a head borrowed from a revolving statue of a ram. Below, a blue halo emanates from an LCD panel, revealing fake advertisements, all of which are exaggerated caricatures of the cybernation of bodies and desires. Nearby, a washbasin adorned with a pewter squid serves as an ashtray, the meticulously arranged latex cigarettes form a strange example of the Japanese sampuru. Finally, two neon lights, halfway between antennae and an abstract logo, signal their presence from afar. In this FERTILITY DEVICE, the subtitle Nudge for the scapegoat evokes the complex relationship between desire and rivalry in simulated worlds such as social networks, content platforms, and online video games. Each element, often appropriated and turned into an ornament, questions our capacity to act, our agency in the face of our loss of independence due to the new forms of automation that are progressively regulating our lives. The scapegoat changes skin all the time, and our emotions, which have become calculable, feed into all sorts of predictive operators, reformulating our relationship with others, with a new otherness. This work is a seductive concentration of the turbulence we experience as it infiltrates our perceptions. TAFAA - FERTILITY DEVICE (NUDGE FOR THE SCAPEGOAT) is part of FERTILITY DEVICE, a group of sculptures exploring autonomous aesthetic generativity. Inspired by the cold, standardised devices of industrial design, these works are an allegory of the autonomous “fertility” induced by generative models. Each iteration of this series of works takes up these questions in a singular way, observing the effects they have on our capacities for representation.

Sarah Deraedt

Date and place of birth: 1984, Asse, Belgium

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Title Untitled Date 2021

Materials Wood, paint, glue, metal

Dimensions 100.97 × 33.97 × 22.86 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions In Situ XVI: Sara Dereadt, MHKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Antwerp (Belgium), from 11 Sep. 2021 to 09 Jan. 2022

Marie-Michelle Deschamps

Date and place of birth: 1980, Montreal, Canada

Lives and works between Zurich, Switzerland and Montreal, Canada

Marie-Michelle Deschamps is interested in language and the processes of meaning. She highlights the relationship between words and things and her work acts as a metaphor that allows her to translate reality in a distanced way. It is, to use Édouard Glissant’s notion, a way of accounting for the opacity at work in the process of transposing meaning into the object.

Born in 1980 in Montreal, Marie-Michelle Deschamps studied at the Glasgow School of Arts. She lives and works between Zurich and Montreal.

Title Untitled

Date 2014

Materials Enamel, copper

Dimensions 38 × 59 × 6 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions POP UP Truck, Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 04 Jun. 2016

A surface folded in on itself seems to move and stretch, revealing its hidden side. Its appearance is that of a cloth that has been thrown down and which is imbued with the contemplative quality of a drapery. Nevertheless, it is made of enamel, which does not detract from the sense of delicacy that emanates from it. Shaped by laser cutting, the sculpture Untitled is part of the artist’s experiments in language. Here, as in other works, she has used the enamelling technique traditionally used in the decorative arts and in jewellery. Since the nineteenth century, this technique has also been used in the production of road signs, thus adorning some of the most common objects with its brilliant varnish. Marie-Michelle Deschamps is interested in this cannibalism of method to produce abstract sculptures that never seem entirely finished: we are left waiting for the sign, the word, or the number that seems to be missing to surface, but which never comes. For Marie-Michelle Deschamps, it is more a question of observing the singular process of a deconstruction of language.

Julien Discrit

Date and place of birth: 1978, Épernay, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Julien Discrit’s work is governed by the discrete and the continuous. More specifically, the artist exploits the concept of the fragment as a symbol of the continuities and discontinuities that dominate the relationship between the human being and the surrounding world, namely the non-human as expressed by the anthropologist Philippe Descola. His thinking is also driven by geography, which the artist uses to “describe the world” as well as to approach the relationship between the visible and the hidden.

Born in 1978 in Épernay, Julien Discrit graduated with honours from the École supérieure d’art et de design de Reims in 2004, where he has taught since 2019. He is represented by Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou (Paris) and Thomas Henry Ross Art Contemporain (Montreal). He lives and works in Paris.

Title Kintsugi

Date 2018

Materials Carrara marble

Dimensions

11.9 × 14.1 × 4.6 cm (entire work) 14 × 12.5 × 3.5 cm (sculpture)

26 × 20 × 13 cm (base)

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Le discret et le continu, Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, Paris from 8 Sep. to 20 Oct. 2018

Seemingly incomplete, this sculpture in Carrara marble represents a human figure. This mutilated, broken face is none other than the reconstitution of the missing fragment of the Nagasaki Angel, a sculpture miraculously spared during the atomic bombing of the city on August 9, 1945. A symbol of peace and hope, the work was offered to UNESCO by the city of Nagasaki in 1976. By restoring the integrity of the angelic face, Julien Discrit reaffirms his attachment to continuity and discontinuity, as does the title of the work, Kintsugi, a Japanese word meaning “golden joint.” By extension, it has given its name to a meditation on the existence of things and its vagaries. By healing the disfigured Angel, Julien Discrit expresses the resilience and permanence of the non-human by linking the past and the present.

Quentin Rose

David Douard

Date and place of birth: 1983, Perpignan, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Having grown up with television and then the internet, David Douard was immersed in words and technology from a very early age. Language, in the form of texts and poems collected on the internet, is the foundation of his work. His sculptures combine technological elements, lettering, and repurposed objects. Douard thus questions the omnipresence of digital technologies, between tools of resistance and factors of alienation. He shapes and manipulates the words he collects which, through his practice, become sculptural materials.

Born in 1983 in Perpignan, David Douard was a resident at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici in 2017–18. He lives and works in Paris.

Title WE Date 2015

Materials Plaster, aluminium, copper, balloon, eggs, chain

Dimensions 108 × 40 × 21 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Bat Breath Battery, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris from 05 Sep. to 10 Oct. 2015

Made up of an accumulation of heterogeneous elements, WE (2015) is part of David Douard’s work on mutation. Hybridization and collage are at the heart of a search for freedom that takes shape in this sculpture. Technological and organic elements combine, the latter embodied here by eggs. In Doaurd’s work, plaster becomes an organic material, a bodily fluid that he describes as a “social movement.” The title is composed of the pronoun we, which is omnipresent in the artist’s work, positioning him as a universal spokesperson. His message, made anonymous by avatars and pseudonyms, constitutes the basis of his work and is expressed through more or less legible lettering.

Julie Robin

David Douard

Title Beat we beat

Date 2019

Materials Silkscreen on fabric, wood

Dimensions 199.5 × 150 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions

Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (Ireland) from 21 Sep. 2019 to 22 Mar. 2020 O’DA’OLDBORIN’GOLD, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris from 12 Jan. to 14 Feb. 2019

Beat we beat (2019) incorporates several elements that run through David Douard’s work. On a piece of screenprinted fabric stretched over a wooden frame, printed forms suggest distorted letters. The title, organized around the pronoun we, positions the artist as a universal spokesperson. His message, made anonymous by avatars and pseudonyms, is here made up of texts collected online. Feeding off his use of the internet and the contemporary technological practices he observes, David Douard presents with Beat we beat a work in which text becomes material and words spread over sculptures like graffiti. A symbol of a place where a revolution seems possible, the internet thus acquires a certain materiality. Technology becomes a tool for creation, like any other recovered material.

Julie Robin

Sophie Dubosc

Date and place of birth: 1974, Paris, France

Lives and works in Rouen, France

Since the mid-2000s, Sophie Dubosc has been developing a singular artistic practice through her complex connection to the modernist heritage. She employs various references by exploring the work of the surrealists as much as the minimalists, drawing inspiration from both Anti-Form and land art. Mainly centred around sculpture and space, her work combines heterogeneous materials, whether natural—ash, hair, fabric, wood—or artificial, such as rubber boots or kitchen cabinets.

Born in 1974 in Paris, Sophie Dubosc lives and works in Rouen. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris, the Université Paris-Sorbonne, and the École du Louvre. She was awarded the PHotoEspaña Discovery Prize in 2001 and the Altadis Prize in 2006.

Inspired by the polysemic nature of the French term hotte, which designates both the large basket carried on one’s back and the structure that covers the flue of a fireplace, Sophie Dubosc creates a strange sculpture that she attaches to the wall. She gives it an organic dimension by choosing hemp, a material she uses in several of her pieces such as Cheval d’arçon (2007) or Mauvaises graines (2010). The numerous natural fibres arranged side by side give her sculpture the appearance of a blonde wig. In other works, she arranges the elements in a plait or bun, associating hemp more directly with hair. Although the form of the sculpture is minimal, it is powerfully evocative. Through its complex connection with the surrealist heritage, Sophie Dubosc’s work, which is often based on the association of opposing ideas or realities, always cultivates an element of ambiguity and strangeness.

Franny Tachon

Sophie Dubosc

Title Cadavre exquis

Date 2007

Materials Wood, resin, plaster

Dimensions 140 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

4 artistes, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 12 Jan. to 23 Feb. 2008

Due to her complex relationship with modernist heritage, Sophie Dubosc’s artistic practice is often based on the appropriation of everyday objects. Associating a resin mannequin body with a plaster head covered in red paint is reminiscent of surrealist assemblages. This is implied by the work’s title, Cadavre exquis, an expression that refers to the game developed by Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy in 1925, which involves juxtaposing different drawings created by various individuals. By drawing on the surrealist imaginary, Sophie Dubosc creates a sculpture that recalls Giorgio De Chirico’s human automatons, Hans Bellmer’s disarticulated dolls, and Man Ray’s mannequins covered in light bulbs. This child’s body, with its amputated limbs and flayed face, gives off an impression of disquieting strangeness, to use Sigmund Freud’s expression which was dear to the surrealists.

Franny Tachon

Julien Dubuisson

Date and place of birth: 1978, Digne-les-Bains, France

Lives and works in Digne-les-Bains, France

Julien Dubuisson’s sculptural work is driven by an anthropological exploration of the conditions under which forms are created by a given society. The artist’s attention to the arrangement and relationship between forms stems from a reflection on the passage from one order of reality to another. Indeed, although Julien Dubuisson frequently uses the moulding technique, he does not do so for its ability to duplicate or reiterate. By implementing minute variations, he turns these objects into materials for thinking about our world in the light of the productions of the past.

Born in 1978, Julien Dubuisson is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris (2005). He lives and works in Digne-les-Bains.

Title Pavillon nocturne

Date 2015

Materials Jesmonite, acrylic resin, HD video (black-and-white, sound)

Dimensions 5 minutes 45 seconds (video) 18 elements 46 × 40 × 41 cm (sculpture, block version) 700 × 45 × 41 cm (sculpture, fragmented version)

Acquisition date 2015

The installation Pavillon nocturne comprises a series of works, see p. 103

Exhibitions Faire et défaire

Bureau d’implantation des lignes de Digne, Digne-les-Bains from 18 Dec. 2015 to 08 Feb. 2016

L’après-midi, Villa Arson, Nice from 04 Oct. to 28 Dec. 2015

L’ordre des lucioles, 17th exhibition of the Prix Ricard, Fondation d’Entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris from 15 Sep. to 31 Oct. 2015

At first glance, Julien Dubuisson’s Pavillon nocturne (2015) looks like a monolith, but this cubic sculpture is made up of eighteen elements, replicas of famous sculptures throughout the history of art. Thus, a Cycladic head from the 3rd millennium BCE, a death mask from the end of the nineteenth century, and a cube by Giacometti come together in what Thomas Golsenne calls an “anachronistic caress”. In order for these connections to occur, changes of scale were necessary. Julien Dubuisson developed a very particular moulding technique: like a spectator facing the work, the artist first works from a photograph to produce a first version of these entities before moulding them several times. For him, the act of making is a mode of knowledge and its reiteration is the path that it takes.

Julien Dubuisson

Title Pavillon nocturne

Date 2015

Materials Jesmonite, acrylic resin, HD video (black-and-white, sound)

Dimensions 5 minutes 45 seconds (video) 18 elements 46 × 40 × 41 cm (sculpture, block version) 700 × 45 × 41 cm (sculpture, fragmented version)

Acquisition date 2015

The work is part of the installation Pavillon nocturne see p. 102

Exhibitions Faire et défaire

Bureau d’implantation des lignes de Digne, Digne-les-Bains from 18 Dec. 2015 to 08 Feb. 2016

L’après-midi, Villa Arson, Nice from 04 Oct. to 28 Dec. 2015

L’ordre des lucioles, 17th exhibition of the Prix Ricard, Fondation d’Entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris from 15 Sep. to 31 Oct. 2015

Vava Dudu

Date and place of birth: 1970, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

The multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu refuses to follow convention: she draws and writes poetry, makes clothes and accessories, and builds furniture and guitars. She asserts her position as an outsider in contemporary art by stating that she “prefers extremes to the middle ground.” Her work as an independent stylist goes hand in hand with her activity as a singer in La Chatte, an electro-zouk punk new wave band founded in 2013 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, aka “Nikolu.” Her underground artistic world, which joyously combines text and image, is expressed through various different media.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works. Together with Fabrice Lorrain, Vava Dudu received the ANDAM (Association nationale pour le développement des arts de la mode) prize in 2001.

Title Sans titre (secu)

Date 2017

Materials Fabric, thread

Dimensions 68 × 140 × 4 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Vava Dudu’s work touches as much on clothing and accessories as it does on music, painting, and drawing. Her underground universe flirts with mass media and mixes text and images. Her work as an independent stylist as well as a singer in the band La Chatte, founded in 2003, makes up an artistic universe that claims a detachment from any utilitarian function. The pair of two-tone Bomber jackets Sans titre (secu) and Sans titre (rity) was designed in a spirit of reciprocity, to be worn by two friends. The jacket’s initial function of providing security, deduced by the word “SECURITY”, is hijacked, not without humour, by splitting the garment in two, and by a phrase, hand-embroidered by the artist, which alludes to the gaze and suggests a non-verbal language.

Vava Dudu

Title Sans titre (rity)

Date 2017

Materials Fabric, thread

Dimensions 68 × 140 × 4 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Title Sans titre (rosé)

Date 2017

Materials 70gsm pink paper, biro

Dimensions 21 × 31 cm (each, 20 sheets)

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Vava Dudu, Vertige profonde, Salon du Salon, Marseille from 24 Aug. to 30 Sep. 2017

Vava Dudu’s work touches as much on clothing and accessories as it does on music, painting and drawing. Her underground universe flirts with mass media and mixes text and images. Her work as an independent stylist as well as singer in the band La Chatte, founded in 2003, makes up an artistic universe that claims a detachment from any utilitarian function. The pair of two-tone Bomber jackets Sans titre (secu) and Sans titre (rity) was designed in a spirit of reciprocity, to be worn by two friends. The jacket’s initial function of providing security, deduced by the word “SECURITY”, is hijacked, not without humour, by splitting the garment in two, and by a phrase, hand-embroidered by the artist, which alludes to the gaze and suggests a non-verbal language.

During a residency at Salon du Salon in Marseille in the summer of 2017, Vava Dudu created Sans titre (rosé), a set of twenty biro drawings on pink paper. Thin black lines represent fragments of female or male bodies. These highly stylized motifs are reduced to a few strokes as the artist likes “the idea of getting a message across in a single line.” Breasts pointing to the sky, fingers swallowed by mouths, tongues buried deep in throats, lips placed on hands are juxtaposed in several sexual playlets. Whether repeated or nested within each other, these forms are mutually generative, creating new anatomies of desire. By mixing pleasure with obscenity—a fellatio appearing alongside a middle finger on the same sheet—Vava Dudu’s drawings display a sexual iconography free of codes and norms. These are the same erotic images that the artist uses on various media, from walls to sheets and clothes.

Franny Tachon

Aysha E Arar

Date and place of birth: 1993, Jaljulia Lives and works in Jaljulia

Title Dear lion, your claws is really strong but mine is more

Date 2022

Materials Acrylic paint, spray paint, cotton fabric

Dimensions 210 × 98 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions Flood, Hamidrasha Gallery, Tel Aviv (Israel) from 11 Feb. to 25 Mar. 2022

Aysha E Arar

Title Dear lion, your claws is really strong but mine is more

Date 2022

Materials Acrylic paint, spray paint, cotton fabric

Dimensions 207 × 160 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions Flood, Hamidrasha Gallery, Tel Aviv (Israel) from 11 Feb. to 25 Mar. 2022

Mimosa Échard

Date and place of birth: 1986, Alès, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Mimosa Échard uses media as diverse as ceramics, oil painting, sculpture, photography, film, and installation, in order to create hybrid ecosystems that bring culture and nature together. Medicinal plants, food supplements, cosmetics, electronic components, contraceptive pills, and fertility stimulants react with each other to create fluid and unpredictable forms. Drawing on cyborg technology, the DIY spirit, and Wicca naturalism, Mimosa Échard’s practice is often qualified as that of a postmodern witch.

Born in 1986 in Alès, Mimosa Échard lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Villa Arson in Nice. Nominated for the Meurice Prize in 2015, she was a resident at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 2020.

Title Antiprisme (Karl)

Date 2014

Materials Brass, steel, galvanised steel

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Venir Voir Venir, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 06 Jul. 2014

Produced in collaboration with Patrick Vindimian, this work by Mimosa Échard is inspired by her research into the tensegrity structures discovered by Karl Ioganson. This seemingly inert sculpture is nevertheless based on mechanical forces. Three elements (brass, steel, and galvanised steel) taken from the Foundation’s building at 9 rue du Plâtre are put in tension to form a figure in a continuum of energy. The work appropriates the qualities of traditional sculpture defined by mass, as well as those of the mobile.

Mimosa Échard

Title A/B8

Date 2016

Materials Seaweed, kombucha, hair removal wax, epoxy resin, packaging, insects, brewer’s yeast, Boots and Schaebens supplements for the skin, rose petals

Dimensions 180 × 200 × 6 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions I’ve got a feeling – Les 5 sens dans l’art contemporain

Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, from 25 May 2023 to 01 Jan. 2024

Milléniales. Peintures 2000-2020, Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine Méca, Bordeaux from 24 Sep. 2020 to 03 Jan. 2021

Par hasard vol. II, La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille from 17 Oct. 2019 to 24 Feb. 2020

IDEATH, Galerie Samy Abraham, Paris from 19 Mar. to 30 Apr. 2016

Title The People

Date 2016

Materials Video

Dimensions 1 hour 53 minutes

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

Mimosa Échard created the A/B series, of which A/B8 is a part, using large Plexiglas panels whose surface is covered with a heterogeneous assemblage of discarded objects and natural elements attached with hair removal wax. The delicate luminescent aspect of the work, with its pink and celadon hues, is reminiscent of selfies retouched with filters on smartphones, tutorials on the use of beauty products, or pornographic images—all worlds featuring flesh that are situated in our contemporary era. The use of birth control pills, food supplements, edible herbs, and fake nails reflects the organic character of A/B8. Mimosa Échard combines industrial elements (Diet Coke, packaging, auto body parts, etc.) and organic elements (plants, eggshells, insects, etc.) until she achieves a stabilised texture that defies both strangeness and gravity. Fixed in wax like the mosquito trapped in a block of amber in Jurassic Park, they retain a vital force that is waiting to be released into the viewer’s space.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

“My village is my matrix,” says Mimosa Échard about the hippie community she grew up in in the Cévennes. She chose her daily family life as the subject of her first feature film. Using a vast personal archive of footage shot on MiniDV over close to a decade, she superimposes various scenes in a two-hour stream of images. Accompanied by music composed by Raphaël Hénard, this reflection on time simultaneously confronts plants and flowers, pop packaging and old-fashioned interiors. This juxtaposition of divergent elements is inspired by her experience as a child discovering MTV culture on television in the middle of the wilderness. According to Mimosa Échard, this assemblage of forms and colours has a ghostly and poetic effect and is based on a “sensual relationship” with the video medium. The artist summons to the screen the plastic experiments that she would later develop in her studio, as she explains: “The People resonates with everything I am now doing—transparency, liquidity, the cohabitation of human and non-human worlds.”

Franny Tachon

Mimosa Échard

Title I'm raining

Date 2023

Materials Canvas, anti-radiation fabric, aluminium foil, clear acrylic varnish

Dimensions 180 × 110 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions Coming Soon, en attendant demain, Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, from 28 Feb. to 12 May 2024

I think my cells are fucking behind my back, Heidi Gallery, Berlin (Germany) from 15 Sep. to 28 Oct. 2023

Lotte Meret Effinger

Date and place of birth: 1985, Berlin, Germany Lives and works in

Karlsruhe, Germany

Lotte Meret Effinger’s approach is interdisciplinary, involving video, drawing, installation, and publishing. Her work is underpinned by the political, social, and feminist themes that she holds dear, allowing her to explore the relationship between the fluctuation of different identities and their social acceptance.

Born in 1985 in Berlin Lotte Meret Effinger studied digital art and communication design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She lives and works in Karlsruhe.

Title Surface Glaze

Date 2015

Materials HD video | Edition of 5 + 1 artist’s proof

Dimensions 7 minutes 51 seconds

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Surface Glaze (2015) appears as a slow disturbance of the senses, with harmonious and beautiful colours and materials—beige, black, and pink with matte, gloss, and satin. Lotte Meret Effinger has composed a refined, almost sensual aesthetic repertoire. Slow travelling shots linger on skin and pores scrutinized with a macro lens. Body parts move sensually towards the strange object of their desire, when they are not conquered by the latter. To the sound of strangeness, Lotte Meret Effinger makes human and inert matter vibrate in a rare synesthesia. In Surface Glaze, one can almost hear Baudelaire’s ode to the lover’s black tresses, enchanting and full of reminiscences.

Michaela Eichwald

Date and place of birth: 1967, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Michaela Eichwald first created visual works before devoting herself entirely to her artistic practice. She uses the body as a tool in her pictorial process, which brings her closer to performance art. As she studied literature and philosophy, she constructs her works through a close relationship with writing, recording her texts, thoughts, and working notes on her blog uhutrust.com.

While Michaela Eichwald is primarily known for her pictorial work associated with abstract expressionism, she has also tried her hand at sculpture, with works that question artistic language and the materiality of creation. Following on from new realism and its “poetic recycling of the real”, as art critic Pierre Restany put it in 1960, she reuses unexpected elements of everyday life (such as noodles or a thermometer) in an experimental and humorous way. She invites the viewer to question the meaning of these objects, in particular through the use of resin, which is suggestive of immortality, in contrast with consumer products. This approach is reinforced by her choice of titles, which are at odds with the work they describe, like Lyrikknappschaft Auswurt (“Poetry tourist bureau”), a linguistic invention that echoes the selfdeprecating uhutrust.com blog where the artist shares her daily life and her thoughts.

Louise Glodt-Chauchoy

Michaela Eichwald

Title Seelische Oxidation

Date 2012

Materials Acrylic, oil, varnish, graphite, cotton, polyester

Dimensions 390 × 140 × 5 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020 5th Ateliers de Rennes : Incorporated! Biennale d’art contemporain de Rennes, Rennes from 01 Oct. to 11 Dec. 2016

Title Thermometer

Date 2010

Materials Thermometer, button, rubber band, wood, resin

Dimensions 25 × 10 × 10 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

This abstract interlacing of colours, created in large brushstrokes using a variety of unusual techniques and media, belongs to the tradition of abstract expressionism, and in particular of the creative gesture of the artist such as in Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Here, however, the canvas engages in an unexpected dialogue with three assemblages of everyday objects, with which it is associated through the same ochre and rust palette, colours reminiscent of the resin used in the sculptures. This material, which symbolises immortality and purity in many civilisations, contrasts with the title of the painting, a linguistic invention with poetic implications. The notion of oxidation, which seems to explain the chromatic range of the work, gives the soul a tangible dimension and makes it subject to physical transformations just like those of an object.

Chiara Perez

Louise Glodt-Chauchoy

Michaela Eichwald

Title Lyrikknappschaft Auswurt

Date 2010

Materials Chinese noodles, necklace, resin, seeds

Dimensions 30 × 10 × 10 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Louise Glodt-Chauchoy

Marc Étienne

Date and place of birth: 1971, Arles, France

Lives and works in Marseille, France

From performance to sculpture to assemblage, Marc Étienne’s shapeshifting artistic practice explores the connections between humans, nature and their surroundings. He takes a close interest in amateur practices, crafts, and folklore in a process aimed at pushing the limits of the field of art. Despite their hyperrealism, his works always record the traces of the artist’s hand, which, he describes as “traces of the time spent working, toiling, or traces of pleasure.”

Born in 1971 in Arles, Marc Étienne is a graduate of the École Supérieure d’Art d’Avignon and the Beaux-arts de Lyon. He was nominated for the Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize in 2007. He lives and works in Marseille.

Title Untitled Date 2007

Materials Resin, wax

Dimensions 120 × 120 × 140 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris

from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Folklore, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris from 28 Sep. to 10 Oct. 2007

Marc Étienne presents a miniature forest moulded in malleable resin raised on simple trestles that seems to come straight out of the forest of Brocéliande or Alice in Wonderland. This is a world of tales and legends, but the work moves slightly away from the wondrous to take on a stranger and darker dimension suggested by the mushrooms that appear like outgrowths at the foot of these bruised tree trunks—an ordered nature, a perfect replica of reality, and yet nothing more than a decor. Marc Étienne is inspired by the theory developed in the 1970s by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in his essay entitled “The Uncanny Valley” and quickly applied to 3D animation: despite the extreme realism that animated films can achieve, certain details prevent us from believing in the illusion and send our conscious mind into a state of confusion because it can no longer distinguish between the real and the fake.

Marianne Tricoire

Éléonore False

Date and place of birth: 1987, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Éléonore False’s practice involves found images and the placing in space of images that she cuts and reassembles. “Her work is based on the collection of reproductions in libraries, archives, books… While the term ‘collage’ has been used to describe Éléonore False’s work, it fails to qualify a practice that is more closely related to the intelligence of sculpture”. (François Quintin, excerpt from “Collagiste incantatoire”, Arts Magazine, September 2014).

Born in 1987 in Paris, Éléonore False graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris (2013) and ENSAAMAOlivier de Serres. She was a resident at Triangle France in 2014. She lives and works in Paris.

“The images, which hold Éléonore False in a captive fascination, rarely come from magazines or from urban noise that saturates our vision to the point of apathy. Her work is based on collecting reproductions in libraries, archives, books... The representation of the body is often the object of her research in fields ranging from anthropology to antiquity, from ruins to fashion, from art to dance. The artist manipulates, enlarges, shifts, slices, cuts and hollows out, and decolourises to bring images back to life, to revive them to our astonishment by playing with their situation, their proportions, or the perspectives they create. While the term ‘collage’ has been used to describe Éléonore False’s work, it fails to qualify a practice that is more closely related to the intelligence of sculpture. The images occupy the space, qualify it. The fragments of bodies often create a link between the plane and the volume, for which there is no modelling or shaping, but a simple shift from one to the other.”

François Quintin, excerpt from “Collagiste incantatoire”, Arts Magazine, September 2014

Richard Fauguet

Date and place of birth: 1967, La Châtre, France

Lives and works in Châteauroux, France

Richard Fauguet’s work is often associated with the art of collage, but assemblage might be the better term. While the former designates the arbitrary juxtaposition of unrelated elements, the second leaves open the possibility that their combination may have secret predestinations, and that all that was needed was the artist’s enlightened, precise, and playful intuition to reveal the obvious. It is a work of precision, and yet no virtuosity or particular know-how is required.

Title Untitled

Date 2000–4

Materials Ping-pong table, stainless steel rods, ping-pong balls

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Richard Fauguet - Daniel Schlier, Frac Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême from 16 Oct. 2015 to 16 Jan. 2016

Pop up 2 - Richard Fauguet, 44 GL, Paris from 21 Jun. to 12 Jul. 2013

De leur temps, 10e anniversaire du prix Marcel Duchamp

Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, Strasbourg from 05 Nov. 2010 to 28 Feb. 2011

Ni vu, ni connu, FRAC-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine Limousin, Limoges from 12 Mar. to 12 Jun. 2010

De leur temps

Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, Strasbourg from 19 Jan. to 24 Feb. 2006

Ping-pong is a theatre of action—drawing room theatre, but one that still generates its own spectacle. Richard Fauguet reproduces with precision the trajectory of the balls passing from one side of the net to the other. The viewer of this work is thus able to be everywhere at once and to perceive fixed, condensed durations, as in a “Matrix effect”. The sight of the path of these ping-pong balls recalls the fascinating scientific images of Harold Edgerton, or the late works of the American photographer Berenice Abbott who experimented with the effect of a strobe light on the bounces of a golf ball. Through their movement, Richard Fauguet’s ping-pong balls, inanimate objects by nature, seem able to express a behaviour: there is the falling, rolling ball, the match ball, the triumphant, the runaway, and the “let” serve that barely crosses the net. The balls seem cosmic, moved by suspended destinies as if they were spinning an old mechanical orrery, a machine invented to understand the movement of the planets in the solar system. Our attention, captivated by the magic of the suspended movement, enables us to glimpse an imaginary world where banal objects seem to distance themselves, appearing a little strange to us, revealing their unsuspected kinship with other times, other cultures, other dimensions, other worlds.

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

The Molecular History of Everything

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne from 17 Dec. 2004 to 27 Feb. 2005

Pas d’fumée, pas d’feu, Galerie Art:Concept, Paris from 10 Jan. to 28 Feb. 2004

Qu’est-ce que la photo sculpture ? Collection FRAC Limousin

Les coopérateurs, Limoges

Adélaïde Feriot

Date and place of birth: 1985, Libourne, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Adélaïde Feriot constructs tableaux vivants in which performers interact with objects made of wax, ceramics, or prosthetics. These function as appendages that either inhibit or structure the body, introducing a disruptive dimension into the portrait just as the corporeality of the flesh upends the pictorial immobility. Adélaïde Feriot explores the thin line between the living and the lifeless, time and its suspension, the ultimate moment in order to examine the hesitation in the act of these bodies become images.

Born in 1985 in Libourne, Adélaïde Feriot is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Lyon. She lives and works in Paris.

Title Le Belvédère

Date 2012

Materials Paraffin | Edition 1 of 2 + 1 artist’s proof

Dimensions

18 × 18 × 51 cm (cone)

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions 58th Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge from 15 May to 12 Jun. 2023

Joueuses, L’Auditorium, Rezé from 15 to 16 Nov. 2020

La poésie du geste, Carreau du Temple, Paris 04 Feb. 2016

La Nuit des Tableaux vivants II, Biennale de Belleville, Paris from 22 Sep. 2012 to 01 Jan. 2013

Libretto VI, Artissima, Turin from 09 to 11 Nov. 2012

Inspired by the wigmaker’s cones that protected the face from the rice powder applied to the hair, Adélaïde Feriot has equipped the characters in her tableaux vivants with these strange appendages. The performance Le Belvédère (2012) is designed for between one and four characters aged twenty-seven, of the same height, either male or female. It begins when one of them puts on the cone, and ends when, in an intimate relationship with the passing of time, the character decides to show their true face. The static work is “an image to be upheld”, to use the artist’s words, a publicly offered image to which the character remains blind, a secret mental image of the viewer fantasized in this cone, this prism.

Daniel Firman

Date and place of birth: 1966, Bron, France

Lives and works between New York, United States and Bordeaux, France

The body and its relationship to space is at the heart of Daniel Firman’s research. Through a multidisciplinary practice combining dance, performance, sculpture, and photography, he explores the notions of movement, balance, gravity, and time. His works capture and translate the suspended movements of the bodies they represent in an attempt to capture a temporary and precarious point of balance. They create presence and are proposed as tools “used to question the structures of the living.”

Born in 1966 in Bron, Daniel Firman was trained at the École des Beaux-arts de Saint-Étienne, then at the École des Beaux-arts d’Angoulême. His work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia (2017), the Venice Biennale (2009), and the Palais de Tokyo (2008). He lives and works between New York and Bordeaux.

Dansé version 4 is a photograph that captures an anonymous man’s jump. Photographed from behind, his body tense, he seems to float among the passengers in the station’s space. The photograph freezes the precise moment of his ascent in the air and suspends his movement in time. It is part of the photographic series Dansé, exhibited in 2005, which explores the notions of gravity, time, and movement by capturing levitating bodies. Daniel Firman finds multiple echoes between the gestures he captures and the visual dance of the 1990s and 2000s, notably through work on posture, maintained immobility, and the gesture-action found in Dansé version 4. The whole series offers a reflection on the body and its relationship to space through danced gestures, proposing a choreographic grammar that is more widely deployed in the artist’s sculptural work with Attitudes and Gestes dansés

Suzana Danilovic

Jean-Pascal Flavien

Date and place of birth: 1971, Le Mans, France Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Since the 2000s, Jean-Pascal Flavien has made the house his central theme, reflecting on the occupation of space by combining architecture, sculpture, and performance. Initially in the form of models, then of maquettes, and finally of habitats, his architectural structures are conceived as “house-sculptures”, or inhabitable sculptures. His pared-down, monochrome aesthetic is close to modernism, with a focus on the constrained habitat.

Born in 1971 in Le Mans, Jean-Pascal Flavien studied at the École régionale des Beaux-arts de Rennes before studying further in Italy and the United States at the University of California. He now lives and works in Berlin.

Title Night house at daytime

Date 2011

Materials Cement, tinted wood, tinted Plexiglas, paper

Dimensions 40 × 60 × 47 cm (Night house at daytime model) 60 × 80 cm (photo)

4 × 31 × 41.5 cm (Tutuguri open book, page 85 [Antonin Artaud], 2013)

Acquisition date 2016

The installation Night house at daytime comprises a series of works, see p. 121 and 122

Exhibitions Jean-Pascal Flavien: night house at daytime

Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels from 10 Jun. to 16 Jul. 2011

This maquette is designed as a building immersed in a constant night. The house is rectangular in plan and has three levels. The first is a concrete garden that constitutes a “Zen garden” in reverse. Black basalt steps lead up to the studio, whose tinted Plexiglas windows only let in dim light. Finally, the “Aztec” roof made of hollow stepped pyramids is an invitation to observe the stars. On the outside, the dark walls of the house resemble a wall seen at night, with reinforcements like a useless, hollow concrete fortification. Like Marcel Duchamp, who gave precedence to the principle of presentation of readymades rather than their nature, Jean-Pascal Flavien’s maquette dissociates the intelligibility of the sculpture from its comprehension. This habitable sculpture project was presented in 2011 at the Galerie Catherine Bastide with photographs, painted metal medallions, and books about the night which, exhibited under smoked Plexiglas, extended the darkness of the house.

Claire Tallon

Jean-Pascal Flavien

Title cowboy photo (no 05)

Date 2011

Materials C-print, tinted Plexiglas, anodized aluminium

Dimensions 60 × 80 cm, 60.2 × 80.2 (framed)

Acquisition date 2016

The work is part of the installation Night house at daytime, see p. 120

Exhibitions Jean-Pascal Flavien: night house at daytime Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels from 10 Jun. to 16 Jul. 2011

Title cowboy photo (no 06)

Date 2011

Materials C-print, tinted Plexiglas, anodized aluminium

Dimensions 60 × 80 cm, 60.2 × 80.2 (framed)

Acquisition date 2016

The work is part of the installation Night house at daytime, see p. 120

Exhibitions Jean-Pascal Flavien: night house at daytime Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels from 10 Jun. to 16 Jul. 2011

The photograph cowboy photo (nº 05) depicts a cowboy on horseback in a Mexican landscape. It appears to have been taken at sunset, and the smoky Plexiglas that acts as the window onto this scene further accentuates its darkness. Seen from behind, the lone rider appears to be immersed in a perpetual twilight that makes him difficult to make out. This image belongs to a series of similar shots exhibited at Galerie Catherine Bastide in 2011, alongside the model Night house at daytime, a sculpture-habitat immersed in endless night. The Mexican rider echoes the Native American-inspired roof of the house, which situates it in a Mesoamerican universe with its stepped pyramids. Like the texts beneath smoked Plexiglas and the “Suns”, painted metal sculptures presented for the occasion, the image reflects a nocturnal theme. Together, these works complement the sculpture and evoke the world that can be seen through the house’s darkened windows.

Claire Tallon

The photograph cowboy photo (nº 06) depicts a cowboy on horseback in a Mexican landscape. It appears to have been taken at sunset, and the smoky Plexiglas that acts as the window onto this scene further accentuates its darkness. Seen from behind, the lone rider appears to be immersed in a perpetual twilight that makes him difficult to make out. This image belongs to a series of similar shots exhibited at Galerie Catherine Bastide in 2011, alongside the model Night house at daytime, a sculpture-habitat immersed in endless night. The Mexican rider echoes the Native American-inspired roof of the house, which situates it in a Mesoamerican universe with its stepped pyramids. Like the texts beneath smoked Plexiglas and the “Suns”, painted metal sculptures presented for the occasion, the image reflects a nocturnal theme. Together, these works complement the sculpture and evoke the world that can be seen through the house’s darkened windows.

Claire Tallon

Jean-Pascal Flavien

Title cowboy photo (no 07)

Date 2011

Materials C-print, tinted Plexiglas, anodized aluminium

Dimensions 60 × 80 cm, 60.2 × 80.2 (framed)

Acquisition date 2016

The work is part of the installation Night house at daytime, see p. 120

Exhibitions Jean-Pascal Flavien: night house at daytime Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels from 10 Jun. to 16 Jul. 2011

The photograph cowboy photo (nº 07) depicts a cowboy on horseback in a Mexican landscape. It appears to have been taken at sunset, and the smoky Plexiglas that acts as the window onto this scene further accentuates its darkness. Seen from behind, the lone rider appears to be immersed in a perpetual twilight that makes him difficult to make out. This image belongs to a series of similar shots exhibited at Galerie Catherine Bastide in 2011, alongside the model Night house at daytime, a sculpture-habitat immersed in endless night. The Mexican rider echoes the Native American-inspired roof of the house, which situates it in a Mesoamerican universe with its stepped pyramids. Like the texts beneath smoked Plexiglas and the “Suns”, painted metal sculptures presented for the occasion, the image reflects a nocturnal theme. Together, these works complement the sculpture and evoke the world that can be seen through the house’s darkened windows.

Claire Tallon

Aurélien Froment

Date and place of birth: 1976, Angers, France Lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland

Situated between documentary and fiction, Aurélien Froment’s multidisciplinary practice draws on the principles of narration and mise en abyme. References abound in his work through a combination of texts, images, and videos. He revisits pre-existing works, forms, and concepts whose multiple interpretations he analyses and deconstructs. Rather than drawing unambiguous conclusions, Aurélien Froment prefers the grey areas, playing with the ambiguity that accompanies these ideas and drives our world.

Born in 1976 in Angers, Aurélien Froment studied at the École régionale des Beaux-arts de Rennes, the École supérieure des Beaux-arts de Nantes, and Manchester Metropolitan University. Winner of the young creation prize at the Mulhouse 001 biennial (2001), he has also participated in the biennials of Gwangju (2010), Lyon (2011), Venice (2013), and Sydney (2014). He lives and works in Edinburgh.

Title L’idée de Camillo

Date 2013

Materials Video

Dimensions 26 minutes 18 seconds

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Aurélien Froment et Raphaël Zadka, Les Abattoirs - FRAC Occitanie

Toulouse, from 23 Sep. 2016 to 08 Aug. 2017

News from Earth, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg from 24 Apr. to 21 Jun. 2015

De l’ombre et des idées, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris from 19 Sep. to 08 Nov. 2014

The Encyclopedic Palace (Le Palais Encyclopédique) – 55th Venice Biennale, Venice from 01 Jun. to 24 Nov. 2013

Through a female magician’s monologue performed by Olwen Fouéré, L’idée de Camillo appropriates and deconstructs the theory presented by the Italian humanist Giulio Camillo in The Theatre of Memory in the late sixteenth century. Drawing on the ancient art of memory, he developed a universal mnemonic system in the form of a theatre with the aim of gaining access to infinite knowledge about the world. In Aurélien Froment’s film, the character introduces this concept by combining Camillo’s text describing his project and its interpretation by a contemporary. Between fiction and documentary, the work brings together and confronts two primary sources to deliver a new reading of the concept which, far from being a demonstration, plays on the ambiguity of the idea. Despite the precision of the information communicated by the actress, the system devised by the Italian remains abstract and opaque for the viewer. The film was made with the support of the Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin for the exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico presented at the international pavilion of the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale (2013).

Suzana Danilovic

Kasia Fudakowski

Date and place of birth: 1985, London, England Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

The Alchemy of the Hinge

2023 Materials Steel, Plexiglas, acrylic paint, bulb, wiring Dimensions 172 × 57 × 87 cm

date 2023 Exhibitions Gallery Power LTD, Galerie ChertLüdde, Berlin (Germany) from 04 Feb. to 06 Apr. 2023

Simon Fujiwara

Date and place of birth: 1982, London, United Kingdom Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Simon Fujiwara’s multidisciplinary practice explores human relations, memory, identity, and intercultural exchange. Influenced by his personal history and his Anglo-Japanese identity, the artist develops narratives mixing reality and fiction. In his installations, Simon Fujiwara takes on the roles of artist, anthropologist, writer, or actor.

Born in London in 1982, Simon Fujiwara studied architecture at Cambridge University before studying art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He is represented by Esther Schipper (Berlin) and Dvir (Tel Aviv, Brussels, Knokke-Heist), and lives and works in Berlin.

Title Rehearsal for a Reunion

Date 2013

Materials Vidéo, wood, ceramics, hammers

Dimensions 73 × 205 × 30 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions My Brother is a Liar, 601Artspace, New York from 28 Oct. 2015 to 23 Jan. 2016

My Third Land, Frankendael Foundation, Amsterdam from 01 Sep. 2013 to 01 Feb. 2014

On a Japanese-style shelf, a television set broadcasts Rehearsal for a Reunion. It is surrounded by objects from a tea ceremony, a book by ceramicist Bernard Leach, and two photographs: one in which Simon Fujiwara poses with his father, the other showing Bernard Leach with his friend Shoji Hamada. At the heart of the installation, the video shows the artist and an actor. Scripts in hand, the two men rehearse the scene around a tea set: a reunion between the artist and his father after twenty years of separation. To celebrate their reconciliation, father and son made a copy of a tea set by Bernard Leach, whose style brings together Eastern and Western aesthetics. By linking this specificity to his own experience, Simon Fujiwara makes the tea set the symbol of his filiation and his Anglo-Japanese culture. Situated between reality and fiction, his work stems from a reflection on intercultural and intergenerational relations.

Quentin Rose

Simon Fujiwara

Title New Pompidou

Date 2014

Materials HD video, colour and sound

Dimensions 18 minutes 22 seconds

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Infinite Sculpture: From the Antique Cast to the 3D Scan École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris from 17 Oct. 2019 to 12 Jan. 2020

Jeudi des Abattoirs—Beaubourg, centre d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Les Abattoirs – FRAC Occitanie Toulouse, Toulouse 02 Mar. 2017

Title Likeness

Date 2018

Materials Wax, fibreglass, small objects

Dimensions 132 × 115 × 74 cm

Acquisition date 2018

Exhibitions Everything Anne, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston from 10 Oct. 2020 to 13 Mar. 2021

Preis der Nationalgalerie, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin from 15 Aug. 2019 to 24 Feb. 2020

Revolution, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 13 Oct. 2018 to 06 Jan. 2019

The film New Pompidou follows the process of the creation and production of a plaster sculpture cast from a “gerberette”, a steel cantilever that is central to the structure of the Centre Pompidou. This surprising form serves as the artist’s sarcophagus for an intimate narrative in which the history of the Marais, the thwarted ambition of an architecture student, and a rose stolen from the Georges restaurant on the roof of the Musée d’art moderne are interwoven. The imminent resurrection of this New Pompidou celebrates the death of a Paris that is no longer, of a dissipated knowledge, a bygone history, a love that is fading away—a quiet death carried in procession on the evening of Valentine’s Day, a performative act captured in the filmed version.

Work produced with the support of the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in 2014 as part of the Centre Pompidou’s Nouveau Festival

Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

Likeness, an installation produced specifically for Lafayette Anticipations’ Revolution exhibition, is constructed around the reproduction of the figure of Anne Frank, identical to the one on display at Madame Tussauds Berlin since 2012. The young girl is portrayed in the process of writing her diary at her desk amidst the decor of her hiding place. An image of a frozen, everfragile humanity, the mannequin looks at the viewer with a slight smile. Pushing the visceral need to make images to the extreme, a compulsion already at work in these museums that have become the pretext for incessant selfies, Simon Fujiwara decided to film the wax doll with a Bolt camera equipped with a robotic arm and control rig. Anne Frank thus becomes the object of an intrusive scrutiny that borders on indecency. As a counterpoint to Lafayette Anticipations’ machine-building, Likeness appears as the harbinger of a mechanised world in which the notion of collective memory is confronted with the cold, unrestrained objectivity of gestures formerly performed by human beings.

Ellie Ga

Date and place of birth: 1976, New York, United States Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Ellie Ga’s work develops through ambitious long-term projects in which the artist accumulates multiple elements. Documents, photographs, found objects, and sound or video recordings are articulated in different configurations such as installations, exhibitions, or performances. Ellie Ga gives equal importance to different types of narratives. She combines scientific documents and data with stories that she constructs on the basis of her memories and encounters, blurring the line between reality and fiction.

Born in 1976 in New York, Ellie Ga holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College in New York. She is co-founder of the art and publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse.

Title Pharmakon

Date 2013

Materials Paper | Edition 2 of 5 + 2 artist’s proofs

Dimensions 48.3 × 30.5 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

At once remedy and poison, the pharmakon is the ambivalent substance of care that must be taken care of, the liberating instrument as an alienating tool. It gives its name to this typographic work on paper that narrates the birth of the god Thoth and his powers. Among the latter, “the drug of reminding” is the formula of recollection and memory that is writing. From her work on the remains of Alexandria in Egypt, Ellie Ga has developed a reflection on writing as a tool for an archaeology of memory. She also treats this medium of memory as a vector of forgetting: the word, this pharmakon, the externalization and materialization of memory, would also be what distances us from remembered knowledge and the internalized past.

Ellie Ga

Title Projection Harbor

Date 2013

Materials Silver gelatin print

Dimensions 40.6 × 40.6 cm (work) 42.5 × 42.5 × 4 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Title Four Thousand Blocks

Date 2014

Materials Video installation with 3 projections | Edition 2 of 3 + 1 artist’s proof

Dimensions 23 minutes 40 seconds

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Projection Harbor is the photographic counterpart to Ellie Ga’s work Four Thousand Blocks, a narrative video triptych that explores, through the myth of the god Thoth, the values of history and writing for contemporary society. Projection Harbor is a blurred image that presents two dice from the myth of Thoth that are found in the video triptych: the god of writing and remembrance also governs over the magic of this world and the occult sciences. With this multimedia project, Ellie Ga expresses the search for the right way to evoke the past by focusing on the production of language that stems from myths.

In the video triptych Four Thousand Blocks, Ellie Ga examines the transmission of memory and history. This narrative work imbued with a mythological dimension unfolds around a central video of the exploration of the waters of the Lighthouse of Alexandria—one of the seven wonders of the world. It recreates the artist’s experience of diving among these archaeological remains of Egyptian civilization, monuments of a collective memory and a universal foundation of culture. The other two videos act as metadiscourses, illustrating the process of creating a typography. In the background is a reference to Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge, and by extension of writing—a condition for the perpetuation and dissemination of knowledge, a tool of memory and history. In Four Thousand Blocks, Ellie Ga questions this function of writing. Shouldn’t forgetting be considered a value? And furthermore, don’t the words we use to preserve the facts paradoxically lead to the erasure of the lived experience from our memory?

Cyprien Gaillard

Date and place of birth: 1980, Paris, France Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Cyprien Gaillard’s multifaceted practice encompasses photography, performance, and video, but also installation and intervention in public space. His approach, which he describes as a form of “vandalism,” questions with humour and nostalgia the traces that human beings leave in nature, particularly through architecture, and their resistance to the passage of time.

Born in 1980 in Paris, Cyprien Gaillard spent his childhood in the United States before studying at the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL). He was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2010. He lives and works in Berlin.

Title Real Remnants of Fictive Wars I

Date 2003

Materials 35mm film transferred to DVD

Dimensions 19 minutes 20 seconds

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Cyprien Gaillard, Real Remnants of Fictive Wars I, Centre d’art –Les Églises, Chelles, from 31 May to 25 Jul. 2008

This film documents an action carried out by the artist in nature near the town of Chelles in the Paris suburbs. Cyprien Gaillard emptied fire extinguishers and let clouds of artificial fog evaporate between the trees, as if a building had been destroyed. The viewer is thus placed in an ambivalent situation, torn between the seductive power of the beauty of the scene and the awareness that this intervention remains a form of vandalism simulating a process of degradation. Gaillard follows in the footsteps of Robert Smithson, the leading figure of land art from whom he drew much inspiration, and takes up the notion of entropy as defined by the artist, that is to say the irreversible transformation of nature towards chaos. Through these images, which can be read as landscapes of forthcoming ruins, Gaillard positions himself as an archaeologist of the future and presents a vision of the irreversible traces left by human beings on nature, revealing their emptiness, but also all their beauty.

Marianne Tricoire

Ryan Gander

Date and place of birth: 1976, Chester, United Kingdom Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Ryan Gander’s work combines the everyday with the esoteric, the banal with the precious. He pushes us to question our knowledge and reinvent our language in order to understand his work, which functions like a puzzle made up of connections and stories. The viewer has to find hidden clues to solve the enigma laid out by Ryan Gander. To construct his works, the artist uses different media including sculpture, film, writing, installation, and performance.

Born in 1976 in Chester, Ryan Gander studied at the University of Manchester, the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (Netherlands). He lives and works in London.

Title Describe the effect of watching a Godard film – (Alchemy box #13)

Date 2009

Materials Black box, Letraset

Dimensions 37 × 20 × 26.5 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Alphaville Alfaville, (SIC), Brussels from 19 to 22 Dec. 2012

L’institut des archives sauvages, Villa Arson, Nice from 17 Feb. to 28 May 2012

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Ryan Gander: It’s a right Heath Robinson affair, gb agency, Paris from 14 Mar. to 18 Apr. 2009

Ryan Gander created several alchemy boxes using the principle of the sealed box. The contents of each of them, meticulously inventoried and classified, are inscribed on the adjacent wall. Describe the effect of watching a Godard film - (Alchemy box #13) contains elements related to time, duration, movement, and still life. The work is entirely black, except for a permanently lit light-emitting diode. The meaning Ryan Gander has tried to give to these works seems as hermetic as their content. They could be considered as archives of a present moment, of an instant.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Ryan Gander

Title I need some meaning I can memorize (The Invisible Pull)

Date 2012

Materials Wind machines

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Documenta 13, Documenta, Kassel from 09 Jun. to 16 Sep. 2012

Title Any velocity that isn’t zero

Date 2012

Materials Photographs

Dimensions 165.7 × 125.6 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Ryan Gander: An exercise in cultural semaphore, gb agency, Paris from 25 Feb. to 14 Apr. 2012

I need some meaning I can memorize (The Invisible Pull) is an interactive work composed of six fans hidden from the viewer. When visitors enter the room where the installation is displayed, it is completely empty; they feel nothing but a simple breeze that “draws people into the space,” says Gander. It took five years of work and technological development to achieve this result. The artist attaches great importance to this empty space, which allows him to question notions of use, function, and cost. Through this work, he questions the way in which a space with a large scope can be consumed by small ideas. The museum space and the exhibition space are represented by this place because of its almost sacred, all-white quality, in which one must be discreet. Gander also wants to astonish the viewer, who does not understand where the breeze is coming from. With this approach, he focuses on the relationship between visitors and his work. This work also allows him to question the materiality of art: can art be invisible?

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Any velocity that isn’t zero is a series of eight photographs that differ in format and technique. They all represent the same subject taken at the same time, but from different points of view. Ryan Gander used different devices—a Polaroid camera, a 35mm film camera, a mobile phone, a computer webcam, a digital compact camera, etc.— and also varied optical lenses—macro perspective, telephoto through a window, image reflected in a mirror, image from a computer, etc. The moment he wished to document is that of writing the text describing this creation. As Ryan Gander has often criticized artists appearing in the context of their work, Any velocity that isn’t zero marks a transition in his approach. Through these photographs, he questions the role of the creator of the work: the one who stages their work and becomes its main subject. It is, however, a self-portrait that does not show the artist’s face, but rather draws its contours. By using different instruments and techniques, Ryan Gander also reveals how difficult it can be to represent reality.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Mark Geffriaud

Date and place of birth: 1977, Vitry-sur-Seine, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Mark Geffriaud creates installations, sculptures, films, and performances whose main themes are the construction of time, the perception of space, and memory. He plays with the representation of the world through associations of ideas and images, literary references, and framing games. The book is central to his research into the reconstruction of reality. Both as a medium and as a means of shifting points of view, it is for him a tool for redefining the organization of the world.

Born in 1977 in Vitry-sur-Seine, Mark Geffriaud graduated from the Beaux-arts de Montpellier in 2005. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Si l’on pouvait être un Peau-Rouge / looking forward

Date 2009

Materials Frame, postcard, mount, wood panel

Dimensions 39 × 39 cm (frame) 250 × 200 × 5 cm (panel)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions à l’envers, à l’endroit… Centre photographique d’Île-de-France, Pontault-Combault from 07 May to 13 Jul. 2014

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

The installation Si l’on pouvait être un Peau-Rouge / looking forward consists of a human-sized wooden panel whose arrangement evokes the shape of an open book placed on its edge. A frame embedded in the panel contains an off-axis postcard that reveals a cut-out in the wood. By opening up a viewpoint on the space behind the device, this opening creates a new relationship to the environment in line with Henri Poincaré’s theories on non-Euclidean systems of perception. The title refers to a text by Kafka consisting of a dissolution of the original statement “If one could be a Redskin” through reading. In the same way, the viewer has a deceptive experience here. Despite the promise of the title, they are unable to experience decentering. Confronted only with the void and the absence of information, the Other remains inaccessible and unknowable.

Romane Grouille

Lydia Gifford

Date and place of birth: 1979, Cheltenham, United Kingdom Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

A painter by training, Lydia Gifford’s approach is driven by a singular conception of abstraction bordering on sculpture. Using poor materials, she inscribes bodily traces in their very materiality, a mise en abyme of the pictorial act which is also a search for presence. In a highly personal rhythm, she alternates diaphanous touches with a saturation of impulsive gestures. Through a form of contamination, her works are part of a phenomenological journey in dialogue with the exhibition space experienced by the viewer.

Born in 1979 in Cheltenham, Lydia Gifford studied at the Chelsea School of Art and Design, then at the Royal College of Art. She won the Valerie Beston Young Artists’ Prize in 2008. Lydia Gifford lives and works in London.

Title Hoist

Date 2013

Materials Gouache, pigment, cotton, panel

Dimensions 195 × 201 × 4 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Often working with humble materials, Lydia Gifford endows her paintings with a sculptural presence. Using composite media, the artist often mixes pieces of fabric or natural substances such as wax or clay with her pigments, creating effects that are both tactile and pictorial. The eye beholds textures ranging from coarse to smooth, humid, chalky, and tender. Viewers can sense the movement of the body and detect the traces of improvised gestures carried out by the artist. Thus, Gifford’s work contains the energy of an impulse absorbed by painting. The two slightly overlapping panels of Hoist also bear witness to a concern for composition, which here too has less to do with pictorial surface than the physicality of the object.

Audrey Pellerin

Lydia Gifford

Title Jump Date 2014

Materials Wood, gesso, ink, oil paint

Dimensions 29 × 25 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions

Lydia Gifford’s works, experienced in their performative thickness, oscillate between monochrome painting and sculptural presence through the combination of modest and sometimes unusual materials: cardboard, fabric, towels, carpet, gesso, wax, ink, pigment, oil, clay, and nails. The artist proceeds in successive layers through a deeply physical process, experimenting with the resistance of the media in order to produce anthropomorphic forms endowed with thought and feelings. Echoing its title, Jump plays with its rough, unbleached surfaces to create haptic sensations by exalting the traces of gestures on the burlap canvas. Its irregular frame exposes the saturation of the fabric fixed intuitively by nails, translating the porous barrier between inside and outside. Often suspended in the studio, these works are then placed in a broader pictorial field within a site-specific context, questioning the temporality and scale of the human body between the horizontal and the vertical.

Veronika Doszla

Fabien Giraud Raphaël Siboni

Dates and places of birth: 1980, France

Live and work in Paris, France

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni explore the history and evolution of technologies. They focus on the limits and capacities of these technologies in order to create another relationship with the world. Through films, installations, performances, and sculptures, they develop narratives that propose a decentering of the anthropomorphic point of view by playing between fiction and reality.

Born in 1980 and 1981 respectively, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni have been working together since 2007. They met at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD) and began their collaboration during their studies at Le Fresnoy. They live and work in Paris.

1981, France

Paris, France

Title La Mesure végétale

Date 2015

Materials UHD 4K video

Dimensions 18 minutes

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

La Mesure végétale is a film shot in the Svalbard archipelago close to the North Pole. The snowy landscape slowly unfolds in a succession of still frames. This windswept natural landscape includes a foreign body: a bunker on the mountainside. This is the world’s seed storage facility, which, thanks to the permafrost, is in an optimal state of preservation. No human figure is present in this work. By this absence, the duo attempt to free themselves from the human perspective. Starting from the principle that cinema has always used the image of man as a unit of measurement, whether corporeal in framing or temporal in narration, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni seek to “decentralize” the gaze and the perception of time through a series of films of which La Mesure végétale is the third opus, after La Mesure Louvre (2011) and La Mesure minérale (2012).

With the support of Netwerk, of the Centre d’art contemporain, of the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Île de Vassivière, and of Lafayette Anticipations — Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris

Léonie Maton

Laurent Grasso

Date and place of birth: 1972, Mulhouse, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Through video, installation, sculpture, photography, and painting, Laurent Grasso alters natural or artificial phenomena in order to challenge the limits of our perception and knowledge. Playing with anachronism, he mixes temporalities to create strange situations between past, present, and future. He thus conceives protean works, always on the cusp of reality and fiction, truth and falsehood.

Born in 1972 in Mulhouse, Laurent Grasso lives and works in Paris. He trained at the Cooper Union School in New York, the Central Saint Martins School of Art in London, the École nationale des Beaux-arts in Paris, and Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing. He was awarded the Altadis prize in 2005 and the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2008 and was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2004–5.

Title Sans titre (Satellite)

Date 2006

Materials 35mm film

Dimensions 9 minutes 52 seconds (loop)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Satellite, Art Basel, Basel from 16 to 20 Jun. 2010

Magnetic Palace, Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes IAC, from 21 Jun. to 19 Aug. 2007

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

In this video, Laurent Grasso films the famous actress Carole Bouquet—who allows herself to be observed like a statue—from every angle. To produce his work, the artist surrounded himself with a team of film specialists (cinematographer, editor). The effects of blur and sharpness, of light and darkness, as well as the establishment of a slow rhythm invite the camera’s gaze to detach itself from that of the spectator. Through this character without a role, the stripped-down set, and the monotonous sound, Laurent Grasso plunges us into a hypnotic atmosphere that becomes increasingly disturbing.

Laurent Grasso

Title Anechoic Wall

Date 2008

Materials Lacquered steel

Dimensions 30 × 30 × 30 cm (80 elements)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

TimeDust, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 01 Mar. to 05 Apr. 2008

Title L’éclipse

Date 2006

Materials Video

Dimensions 10 minutes (loop)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Magnetic Palace, Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes

IAC, from 21 Jun. to 19 Aug. 2007

NADA Art Fair, New Art Dealers Alliance, Miami from 07 to 10 Dec. 2006

L’éclipse, MIT, The List Visual Art Center, Cambridge from 28 Aug. to 10 Nov. 2006

28°, École des Beaux-arts de Valenciennes, Valenciennes from 22 Mar. to 25 Apr. 2006

Neurocinéma, musée départemental de Rochechouart, Rochechouart from 14 Jun. to 22 Sep. 2008

Based on the repetition of abstract geometric forms, the composition of this large panel is structured around a succession of black conical shapes. At first glance, the function of this wall device remains obscure, but the comparison of the work with a technological machine gives it its full meaning: indeed, Anechoic Wall is reminiscent of anechoic chambers, experimental rooms whose walls are covered with foam or fibreglass dihedrals to absorb sound or electromagnetic waves. While the other sculptures in Laurent Grasso’s series are made of copper, wood, or marble, this installation is made of black steel, a material chosen for its brilliance. The reflection of light responds to the absorption of sound, allowing the sculpture to call on different senses. In addition to its intrinsic aesthetic quality, the work conveys the idea of passing from one state to another, between the audible and the inaudible, the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial.

Franny Tachon

For close to ten minutes, colours and shapes change on screen as the red shadow of the moon hides the yellow sun against the orange sky. This film, entirely made by computer using complex cinematographic technology, brings together two phenomena that cannot occur simultaneously in nature: a solar eclipse and a sunset. Laurent Grasso made L’éclipse after studying news reports documenting fake sightings of miraculous events such as UFO sightings. By artificially recreating an imaginary light event, he produces what he calls a “false miracle.” Through the fictitious vision of a sky, he aims to explore the imaginary of natural phenomena and to develop a poetics of the enigma that leads the viewer to doubt these images, but also to question their own beliefs. This exploration of the perception of sensations as well as the ambiguous line between the visible and the invisible is characteristic of Laurent Grasso’s work.

Franny Tachon

Petrit Halilaj

Date and place of birth: 1986, Kostërrc, Kosovo Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Petrit Halilaj’s work is closely connected to the question of origins. His personal history is marked by his family’s exile from the war in Kosovo, a memory that the artist uses as material to explore notions of national and cultural identity by confronting his personal experience with a collective memory. He circumvents reality with the help of stuffed animals, earth, or rubble in order to formulate a political critique of conflicts. His installations are also the breeding ground for reflections on memory, freedom, and identity. As his work begins from research on trauma, the fragmentary character of his installations provides a possible response to the violence suffered by Kosovo and its population.

Born in 1986 in Kostërrc, Petrit Halilaj trained at the Brera Academy in Milan. He lives and works in Berlin.

Title July 14th?

Date 2013

Materials Video

Dimensions 23 minutes

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Poisoned by men in need of some love, Wiels, Brussels from 07 Sep. 2013 to 05 Jan. 2015

July 14th?, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 24 to 27 Oct. 2013

In his youth, Petrit Halilaj was an eyewitness to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in former Yugoslavia, and their aftermaths. The video installation July 14th? and the sculptures Poisoned by men in need of some love reveal the nationalist influence, sparked by this major conflict of the late twentieth century, on Kosovar heritage. Before the war, a well-known collection of taxidermy mounted animals was presented to the Museum of Natural History in Pristina. The political upheaval transformed the museum into an institution celebrating national identity, and the animals were replaced by objects of folklore, compromising their conservation. Relegated to the basement, the stuffed critters gradually mummified and decomposed. In 2013, Halilaj documented their exhumation, recreating and filming sculpted artefacts, thus bringing these animals, who had already suffered a double death, back to life.

Petrit Halilaj

Title Poisoned by men in need of some love (Quattuor Bubo bubo)

Date 2013

Materials Iron, cow excrement, earth, glue, copper

Dimensions 400 × 350 × 50 cm (base) 70 × 32 × 45 cm (approx. 1 owl)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

She, fully turning around, became terrestrial Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, Bonn from 06 Mar. to 18 Oct. 2015

Title Poisoned by men in need of some love

Date 2013

Materials Cow excrement, earth, glue, copper

Dimensions 7 × 29 × 9 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Petrit Halilaj

Title Can we do something together, just this and then free forever. (Light Blue)

Date 2014

Materials Glass, earth, branches, pigment, metal

Dimensions 164 × 90 × 68 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Galerie Kamel Mennour, Art Basel, Basel, from 19 to 22 Jun. 2014

Title Si Okarina e Runikut

Date 2014

Materials Brass, earthenware ocarina, glass

Dimensions 45 × 6 × 6 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Yes but the sea is attached to the Earth and it never floats around in space. The stars would turn off and what about my planet? Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris from 18 Oct. to 22 Nov. 2014

Can we do something together, just this and then free forever. (Light Blue) evokes a monstrance whose interior and exterior are covered with a corrosive fleece. It is protected on one side by a glass plate from which a glowing substance flows. The exterior of the work is covered with sharp branches bristling on its opposite side. A mixture of earth, gravel, glass, pigments, and sand completes the ensemble. Like a fortress under attack from all sides, this installation seems to display formidable defence mechanisms to deal with an enemy, but Petrit Halilaj takes care to add a form of wound, as if a gap had been opened in the protective enclosure. The synthetic and poetic language of this work takes on a universal quality by evoking the wound of an individual or a people pushed to the limit. Its very title carries a tragic dimension: it is a plea, a final request for commitment before a brutal separation, as if the artist were reliving his final memories of his native country before being torn away from it when he was barely an adolescent.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

Petrit Halilaj’s work is nourished by an intimate, memorial and anthropological relationship with the land of his birth. Kosovo represents the material of a work that he constructs with the intensity of resilience handed to those who are displaced by history. Each of his productions carries the story of a time soon to pass, of a space and a culture in mutation. Si Okarina e Runikut is both a work and a musical instrument. Made thanks to the teaching given to the artist by Shaqir Hoti, one of the last Kosovar makers, Petrit Halilaj’s ocarina is a symbol of Kosovo’s own culture: made of clay since the Neolithic period, this typical instrument is one of the idiosyncrasies of his country that the artist brings to our knowledge and our attention. Equipped with a brass link, the instrument can be suspended, in the grip of the wind that will activate this work, which carries ancestral knowledge transmitted by oral culture. Far from depicting the torments of his country, Petrit Halilaj’s works show fragments of his culture, eclipsed from our memories and representations by the conflicts of the 1990s.

Eloise Hawser

Date and place of birth: 1985, London, United Kingdom Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Eloise Hawser’s interest in the way things are made informs her sculptural work which is created from objects collected on the basis of formal criteria, rather than their function. The wide variety of materials found in her work stems from a focus on the evolution of techniques over time, as well as a curiosity for both handmade and industrially produced objects. Between her art of assembly and the strength of her intuition, she brings about a fusion of materials that were not destined to meet.

Born in 1985 in London, Eloise Hawser trained at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford (UK) and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (Germany) where she received the Frankfurt Sparkasse Stiftung prize in 2011. She lives and works in London.

Title Sample and Hold

Date 2013–15

Materials HD video, colour, sound | Edition 2 of 3 + 2 artist’s proofs

Dimensions 4 minutes 58 seconds

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions The Weight of Data, Tate Britain, London from 18 May to 25 Oct. 2015

From the 3D scan of the artist’s father produced by the London-based company Sample & Hold, Eloise Hawser has created a video unlike any other: neither entirely narrative nor purely factual, it is motivated by a desire to see everything from every angle. Several cameras map out the topography of a loved one’s body from different angles, making the thinking being an object of study. The work reflects the artist’s general approach, that of mastering a diversity of recent technologies and manufacturing techniques, and by extension, of knowledge production. Both a work of art and a documentation of the making of a work, Sample and Hold is also the starting point for other works by Eloise Hawser. It provides her with an initial material and a technical mastery that is constantly updated for other works in order to question production and reproducibility in the age of new digital technologies.

Eloise Hawser

Title Untitled Date 2014

Materials Pair of rubber shoes

Dimensions 10 × 10 × 30 cm (each shoe)

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions I am attracted none the less, their variousness, thein ingenuity, their élan vital, and that something, essence quiddity, I cannot penetrate or name Casey Kaplan, New York from 25 Jun. to 07 Aug. 2015 Ends again, Supplement, London from 28 Jun. to 27 Jul. 2014

Eloise Hawser’s approach to art is characterised by her exploration of the creative potential of new production techniques. Since 2009, she has been interested in production processes such as laser scanning, 3D printing, and computer-aided design. She used the data from a scan of her father to create works using different techniques. From a three-dimensional photograph of a clothed body, the artist made several pairs of rubber shoes. With this sculpture, the leather moccasins with tassels become a defining quirk, a particularity of this beloved person. This metonymy of her father gives rise to a series of multiples of shoes which, through the copy, diffract and make the uniqueness of the human being ubiquitous.

Raphaël Hefti

Date

and place of birth: 1978, Biel-Bienne, Switzerland

Lives and works between Zurich, Switzerland and London, United-Kingdom

Raphaël Hefti mainly creates installations and video art. He focuses on industrial production techniques and works with technicians, proposing experimental protocols to put materials to the test. He seeks to introduce the random and the accidental into production lines to create something unexpected. By exploiting the physical properties of materials, he diverts and subverts the production process, resulting in singular aesthetic objects.

Born in 1978 in Biel-Bienne, Raphaël Hefti apprenticed in electronics and mechanics before deciding to devote himself to art in 1998. He lives and works between Zurich and London.

Title HDIRL

Date 2014

Materials Video installation

Dimensions 3 minutes 43 seconds

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Art Basel 2015, Basel, from 18 to 21 Jun. 2015

The installation HDIRL consists of three flat screens mounted on stands. Each monitor continuously broadcasts a video to a background of electronic music. The images show a close-up view of a milling machine working on an aluminium cylinder. The milling operation produces shrill mechanical noises that blend with the upbeat music. This work reflects the artist’s taste for materiality, and his interest not in the final object, but in the technical process, which becomes an aesthetic subject despite the cold precision of the visual capture. The arm of the machine engraves and sculpts forms in the material which paradoxically appears soft under the action of the milling. These works also have a social dimension as they were produced with the expertise of technicians in a collaborative process.

Romane Grouille

Camille Henrot

Date and place of birth: 1978, Paris, France

Lives and works in New York, United States

Camille Henrot’s multidimensional practice encompasses photography and video as well as sculpture and drawing. The artist invites us to renew our gaze on the objects that make up our immediate environment. Passionate about anthropology, literature, and human sciences, she is interested, through a transcultural approach, in the mythologies and beliefs that lie at the heart of the human experience.

Born in 1978 in Paris, Camille Henrot graduated in animation film at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2002. Nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2010, she represented France and won the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She also received the Nam June Paik Prize in 2014 and the Edvard Munch Art Award in 2015. Henrot has lived and worked in New York since 2013.

Title Le Penseur de Rodin (série Desktop)

Date 2013

Materials Bronze

Dimensions 23 × 25 × 20.5 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions The Pale Fox, Chisenhale Gallery, London from 28 Feb. to 13 Apr. 2014

This small polished bronze sculpture reproduces, in a refined and almost minimalist manner, the position of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, a large bronze sculpture of a naked man resting his head on his hand. Here, figuration is absent: only the head and the movement of the elbow remind us of the meditative pose of Rodin’s model. The artist reflects on the models of Western art history, while the roundness of the polished bronze and the sinuous curves of this anthropomorphic figure also evoke the works of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Throughout her career, Camille Henrot has created numerous linear and enigmatic bronze sculptures, often inspired by objects gathered during her travels. She pays great attention to the plastic qualities of her works which are designed to be “visually tactile”—according to her, sculptures are objects that invite themselves into the intimacy of the viewer and can become media for “emotional protection,” like artefacts that one would like to be able to preserve and touch.

Marianne Tricoire

Camille Henrot

Title Grosse fatigue

Date 2013

Materials Video

Dimensions 13 minutes

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions 10th Triennale d’Ottignies, Centre culturel d’Ottignies – Louvain-la-Neuve, Ottignies – Louvain-la-Neuve from 15 Sep. to 28 Nov. 2021

Camille Henrot, Grosse fatigue, musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, from 17 Oct. 2015 to 10 Jan. 2016

Camille Henrot, Grosse fatigue, Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris from 05 Feb. to 08 Mar. 2014

The Encyclopedic Palace (Le Palais Encyclopédique) - 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, from 01 Jun. to 24 Nov. 2013

Camille Henrot’s film Grosse fatigue, which received the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale, was made with the help of an artistic research grant from the Smithsonian Institution (Washington) in 2013. Inspired by the Smithsonian’s encyclopaedic concept and scientific collections, she embarked on an attempt to collect stories about the creation of the world in African, Western, Melanesian, and Asian cultures. Thus, Grosse fatigue functions as a long non-linear poem that articulates these different narratives and images, but also, according to the artist, as an “experience of density” built on the principle of a Google search. Henrot, who is interested in postcolonial issues, invites us to reflect on the authenticity of objects and their collection by Western societies. The recited text is an open reflection that guides the spectator through the continuous flow of images. Henrot sums up her approach in these terms: “What interests me is to bring knowledge to life as a physical experience, not as something to be acquired.”

Marianne Tricoire

Work produced for the international pavillion of the 55th Venice Biennale 2013 entitled Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, with the support of the Moulin Family Endowment Fund. © ADAGP, Paris, 2015

Nathanaëlle Herbelin

Date and place of birth: 1989, Kfar Saba, Israel

Lives and works in Paris, France

Nathanaëlle Herbelin mainly paints private scenes inspired by her surroundings which appeal to the viewer’s emotions. Her works feature human beings or traces of their passage, rooted in a moment in time and its context. The artist’s signature sketch aesthetic underscores the ephemeral nature of these moments, treated with melancholy and humour, tension and softness, in a muted, milky palette inspired by Russian and Ukrainian art.

Born in 1989 in Tel Aviv (Israel), Nathanaëlle Herbelin trained at the Cooper Union in New York (2015) and graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris (2016). She now lives between Paris and Israel.

Title Esquisse pour la baignoire

Date 2022

Materials Oil on wood

Dimensions 33 × 41 × 3.4 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions

In a drab, greyish bathroom, the silhouette of a young woman stands out against the play of geometric shapes created by the wall tiles, the mirror, and the light from the window projected onto her diaphanous body. This sketch from Être ici est une splendeur (2022), a private scene with melancholic overtones, is characteristic of Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s approach, inspired by reality while only providing an approximate transcription of it. While the theme of the bath is a recurring one for the artist, it is also in keeping with the tradition of women at their toilette, as seen in the work of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. However, far from being viewed passively by the male eye, and despite the apparent fragility of her naked body, the woman here observes the viewer with defiance, her provocative gaze reflected in the mirror.

Chiara Perez

Yngve Holen

Date and place of birth: 1982, Braunschweig, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Yngve Holen dissects washing machines, eviscerates vending machines, and scans crushed mobile phones. He is interested in the machines that mark our daily lives by analysing their capacity to drive us to consumption. His work uses industrial production techniques to attack symbols of strength and speed such as the car or the plane and thus rethinks the human being, our limits and our fragility in this era of new technologies.

Born in 1982 in Braunschweig, Yngve Holen studied at the HfBK Städelschule in Frankfurt, from which he graduated in 2010. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

Title CAKE

Date 2016

Materials Plastic, leather, glass, fabric, foam

Dimensions 141.9 × 249.9 × 106.8 cm (front) 142.3 × 249.9 × 98 cm (back)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Action des Galeries Lafayette en faveur de la création artistique Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées, Paris from 04 to 23 Oct. 2022

Down to Earth, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin from 13 Aug. to 13 Sep. 2020

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

CAKE, colette, Paris from 19 Jun. to 05 Aug. 2017

Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

Yngve Holen’s practice draws on industrial design and its applications. Known for his meticulous cuts of everyday objects, for the first time with the work CAKE the artist turned to a mass-produced luxury symbol: a Porsche Panamera coupe. Interested in the incongruity of this racing car, designed both as a sportscar and a family vehicle that seats four, Yngve Holen questions whether the notions of speed and safety are compatible by slicing the car into four sections using a diamond wire. Once cut and no longer functional, the car was presented as an anatomical cross-section, cut sides exposed, the better to reveal its bowels and former power. The work therefore puts an end to an ultimate object of desire as much as it questions the capacity to redistribute wealth equally.

VERTICALSEAT, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 13 May to 14 Aug. 2016

Max Hooper Schneider

Date and place of birth: 1982, Los Angeles, United States

Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States

Max Hooper Schneider draws on his knowledge of landscape design and biology for his cross-disciplinary visual approach. In the age of the Anthropocene, he creates fictional worlds depopulated of any human presence, highlighting the anthropocentric blindness of human infrastructures that affect the animal and plant kingdoms and our environment as a whole. His works are fictional scenarios exposing the critical climatic situations of the Earth’s ecological future.

Born in 1982 in Los Angeles, Max Hooper Schneider holds a master’s degree in landscape design from Harvard University and a degree in biology. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Trained in biology and landscape architecture, Max Hooper Schneider’s practice features a postapocalyptic world deserted by man, where nature is allowed to run wild. His work Cold War Dishwasher (Uranium Glass) presents an ecosystem that stands at the intersection between the animal and mineral kingdoms and humankind. The artist found the first dishwasher marketed in the United States during the “Trente Glorieuses” (the thirty years from 1945 to 1975 following the end of the Second World War) and filled it with dishware sold during the Cold War that contains low levels of uranium. An imaginary vestige of the atomic age, the environment is populated by strange fish with iridescent properties. Cold War Dishwasher (Uranium Glass) therefore creates a collusion between the life sciences and post-war consumer society, exhibiting one of the possible effects of the Anthropocene.

David Horvitz

Date and place of birth: 1982, Los Angeles, United States Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States

Adept at playing with time and space, the American artist David Horvitz gives photography a primordial, poetic, and spiritual role. An integral part of his conceptual practice and his nomadism, photography allows him to capture memories or moments that he presents in the recurring form of postcards. He explains his approach by distinguishing between the concepts of “opportune moment” and “sequential time,” as well as by claiming the existence of a world where the notion of defined duration does not exist. An interdisciplinary artist, Horvitz mixes media and techniques and collects and distributes images and objects.

Born in 1982 in Los Angeles, David Horvitz studied at the University of California at Riverside before graduating from Bard College. He is the founder of Galerie Morille in Los Angeles and Porcino Gallery in Berlin.

Title For Kiyoko

Date 2017

Materials Ink, paper, aluminium

Dimensions 18 × 27 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Summer Rains, SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo from 19 Jul. to 07 Sep. 2019

a n e m o c h o r y, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

from 02 Nov. to 15 Dec. 2018

Eridanus, Galerie Allen, Paris from 23 Mar. to 22 Apr. 2017

What appears at first glance to be a simple photograph of the night sky, For Kiyoko (2017) is not an ordinary celestial image. This elegiac work evokes the artist’s personal story. David Horvitz travelled to Camp Amache, a Japanese-American internment camp set up during World War II in southeastern Colorado to photograph the stars in the night sky. He imagined his grandmother Kiyoko, who was still a teenager, looking at the stars from the place where she was detained seventy-five years earlier. Horvitz dedicates the work to her, thinking of Kiyoko’s amazement at the stellar immensity, and declares his desire to document the “timelessness of space” and offer it to the viewer. Denouncing contemporary racism shortly after Donald Trump’s election, he draws a direct parallel with current events, such as the ban on Muslims entering the United States and the repression of Central American migrants. Through this work, David Horvitz delivers a universal testimony that invites us to look to the past to shape the future.

Oriane Poret

Anne Imhof

Date and place of birth: 1978, Giessen, Germany

Lives and works between Berlin and Frankfurt, Germany

Anne Imhof’s artistic practice includes performance, video, painting, and music, as well as installations and sculptures often presented as remnants of her performances. She creates a rich, dreamlike body of work where bodies, visual arts, music, and architecture merge.

Born in 1978 in Giessen, Anne Imhof graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (Germany) and the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2012 under the direction of artist Judith Hopf. In 2017, she represented Germany at the 57th Venice Biennale where she won the Golden Lion with her performance FAUST. Anne Imhof currently works between Berlin and Frankfurt.

Title Unten, Unten, Unten, Hollow Whale

Date 2014

Materials Concrete, clay, fermented milk

Dimensions 38.5 × 200 × 62 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Anne Imhof, Deborah Schamoni, Munich from 09 May to 28 Jun. 2014

In recent years, the German artist Anne Imhof has become known for her performances in which she creates sets and props that become a pretext for interactions between performers: according to Laura McLean-Ferris, her work is about “staging visible forms of relational transactions” in a world of remote communication. This was the case with the DEAL project, in which Anne Imhof invited the actors to commune around a concrete basin filled with whey from which a bronze tongue emerged, mockingly. Some drink from it, cryptic sentences are exchanged around it, and objects are passed from hand to hand. Around this concrete sarcophagus, an altar of consumption, the community of performers seems to mark its territory according to tacit rules in the form of gifts, counter-gifts, and choreographic dances. The installation Unten, Unten, Unten, Hollow Whale (2014) provides the platform from which to initiate these ritual gestures of commercial exchange—from dealer to client—and desire.

Anne Imhof

Title Untitled Date 2018

Materials Aluminium

Dimensions 12.5 × 10.5 × 7 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions

Natures Mortes, Carte Blanche Anne Imhof, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 22 Apr. to 12 Jul. 2021

This small polished aluminium sculpture has a reclining face with an open mouth that looks like a mask, either male or female, resting on a base, also made of aluminium. The position and uniqueness of this face is reminiscent of the reclining heads of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, but deviates from them through the embossed metal work, which is full of tension and agitation. The artist draws inspiration from the paintings of Balthus and Bacon, which can be seen in the emaciated and tortured features of this aluminium face. Whether painted, sculpted, or performed, Imhof’s work is permeated by the notion of the portrait and its stakes, whether it be the portrait of contemporary youth that she seeks to capture in her performances or more singular, although universal, portraits, like this sculpture.

Marianne Tricoire

Zhana Ivanova

Date and place of birth: 1977, Ruse, Bulgaria

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Zhana Ivanova’s work deals with the reorganisation and reconfiguration of everyday patterns and systems to which we have become accustomed. The artist frequently uses performance to artificially reproduce situations in which social relations and power relationships fluctuate. Through her work, she questions the notion of norms, whether they are objective rules or subjective principles.

Title Borrowed Splendour

Date 2007

Materials Table, chair, microphone, whisky, Coke, cigarettes, lighter, coin, glass, ashtray

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Frequencies, Elevation 1049, Gstaad, 01 Feb. 2019

Chantiers d’Europe festival 2017, Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, Paris 24 May 2017

Ongoing Retrospective (Chapter 2), Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 22 Jan. to 04 Feb. 2016

DZ Hosts The Violet Crab – Nights of Cabaret DRAF - David Roberts Art Foundation, London from 19 to 21 Mar. 2015

Venir Voir Venir, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 06 Jul. 2014

In each performance of Borrowed Splendour, three different people agree to play out a scenario. None of them knows what role they are to play, but they all agree to follow specific instructions: “Lift your eyebrows in a questioning manner. Look at mark 4 on the table, breathe in deeply. Think violent thoughts.” The work constructs a literary space in which action replaces text, thus combining facets of theatre, performance, and sculpture.

Pierre Joseph

Date and place of birth: 1965, Caen, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Considered by Pierre Huyghe to be an “artist’s artist”, Pierre Joseph has produced an expansive body of work since the late 1980s, inspired by contemporary culture, from David Lynch to the Playstation or Bret Easton Ellis. After a revelatory stay in Japan in 1997, his work became conceptual, mixing space and time, the real and the virtual. Driven by the desire to trace his own path, Pierre Joseph conceives the work of art as a “relational object” that transforms the exhibition into a space for exchange and interaction between the artist, the work, and the audience.

Pierre Joseph was born in 1965 in Caen. He graduated from the École des beaux-arts industriels in Grenoble and then became a resident at the Villa Arson (Nice) before teaching in Montpellier. Represented by the Air de Paris gallery, he lives and works in Paris.

Title Jacinthe Blue Pearl

Date 2017

Materials Dibond

Dimensions 130 × 90 cm (work) 132.5 × 93.5 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Pierre Joseph ?, Galerie Chantiers Boîte Noire, Montpellier from 03 Mar. to 08 Apr. 2017

When Pierre Joseph searched for his name on Google, he realized that his works had become confused with those of his namesake, the Belgian painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759–1840), in particular the famous botanical plates prized by Marie-Antoinette and Joséphine de Beauharnais. The artist decided to cultivate this confusion by producing a series of floral photographs in the manner of Redouté’s watercolours. Pierre Joseph captures an oriental hyacinth in a modern and hyper-realistic way by setting it against the light background of a large-format laminated print. Thanks to a precise and luminous shooting process, the artist restores and magnifies the coloured anatomy of the flower by underlining the blue nuances of its corolla and the green harmony of its leaves. In addition, Pierre Joseph invites us to reflect on the artist’s digital identity and presence, as well as their indexation by Google.

Quentin Rose

Leon Kahane

Date and place of birth: 1985, Berlin, Germany

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Leon Kahane creates video works, photographs, and conceptual installations on the themes of migration, identity, and the acceptance of majorities and minorities in a globalized society. Born into a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust, he superimposes texts, images, and archival documents to establish links between his family history and the political upheavals of the twentieth century.

Born in 1985 in Berlin, Leon Kahane initially trained in photography at the BEST-Sabel Berufsfachschule für Design and the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin before studying visual arts at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He was awarded the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft in 2015 and the Prix Ars viva for visual arts in 2017.

Title Europe after 1945

Date 2015

Materials 4K video

Dimensions 47 minutes 11 seconds

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Ars viva 2017: Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane and Jumana Manna Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V, Berlin from 09 Oct. 2016 to 29 Jan. 2017

A 47-minute sequence, Europe after 1945 is a video made by Leon Kahane during the exhibition held at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin in 2015. It shows a walk through the museum space that celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The exhibition focused on the situation of European countries at the time of Liberation, providing a reflection on the evolution of Europe. Leon Kahane films the documents on display, including court documents from the Nuremberg trials belonging to his grandparents, Max and Doris Kahane, who after surviving the Holocaust attended the trials as journalists. Leon Kahane is interested in the transmission of memory and focuses his camera primarily on the visitors to the exhibition. For the artist, contemporary Europe cannot be understood without knowledge of historical upheavals.

Rosanne Moulin

Leon Kahane

Title CV Date Undated

Materials Paper, ink

Dimensions 21 × 29.7 cm (5 elements)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Ars viva 2017: Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane and Jumana Manna Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V, Berlin from 09 Oct. 2016 to 29 Jan. 2017

Title Untitled Date 2016

Materials Paper, ink

Dimensions 29.7 × 21 cm (each)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Ars viva 2017: Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane and Jumana Manna Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V, Berlin from 09 Oct. 2016 to 29 Jan. 2017

CV is a carbon copy of the five-page CV of Leon Kahane’s grandmother, whom he never knew. A Jewish painter, Doris Kahane lived through the horror of the Drancy and Auschwitz camps before being liberated on 18 August 1944. With this work, the artist connects the biography of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, with her artistic practice. Like a fragile museum piece in a glass display case, this CV offers a historical and biographical account that invites us to question the role of memory. The work reflects the artist’s interest in the events and contradictions of history while illustrating his connection to his family history, a major source of inspiration in his work. The work is part of an installation that also includes two portraits engraved by Doris Kahane when she lived in the GDR and framed by Leon Kahane.

Rosanne Moulin

Four black-and-white digital prints on paper are taped to the wall: they are photographs of sculptures of wrestlers in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Magdeburg, Germany. Through this gesture, Leon Kahane highlights the recurrence of the wrestler motif among the museum’s works. Socialist realism’s central focus was to meet the “people,” taking social relations into account. In post-war East Germany, the wrestler embodied the class struggle that communism wanted to put an end to. Attentive to historical events, Kahane questions the legacy of this figure in art. In this process of inheritance, he has given life to the prototype of wrestlers created by his parents in the form of a porcelain sculpture entitled Plastik which he exhibited alongside these four photographs.

Rosanne Moulin

Leon Kahane

Title Plastik

Date 2016

Materials Porcelain

Dimensions 12 × 12 × 12 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Ars viva 2017: Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane and Jumana Manna Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V, Berlin from 09 Oct. 2016 to 29 Jan. 2017

Plastik is a small porcelain sculpture depicting a fight between two sumo wrestlers. Leon Kahane created this work after a prototype created by his parents, who were activists against right-wing extremism in the 1990s in East Germany. The socialist realism in force at the time imposed on artists a “realism” whose primary requirement was the exaltation of reality and that which prefigures a bright future for the country. In post-war East Germany, the fighter thus embodied the class struggle that communism wanted to put an end to. A large number of these sculptures are held in the Museum of Contemporary Art collection in Magdeburg, Germany. When Leon Kahane was invited to exhibit there, he chose to present Plastik and Untitled (2016), four photographs of wrestler sculptures selected from the museum’s catalogue.

Rosanne Moulin

Nino Kapanadze

Date and place of birth: 1990, Tbilisi, Georgia

Lives and works in Paris, France Title April Fool

Exhibitions Cache-cache, Galerie Perrotin, Paris (France) from 07 Jan to 25 Feb 2023

Kerstin Brätsch Debo Eilers

Dates and places of birth: 1979, Hamburg, Germany

1974, Texas, United States Live and work between New York, Naples, and Berlin /

Born in 2010 from the collaboration of German visual artist Kerstin Brätsch (born in Hamburg in 1979) and American sculptor Debo Eilers (born in Texas in 1974), KAYA is an artist duo that lives and works between New York, Naples, and Berlin. The name of the collective refers to the project’s muse and collaborator, Kaya Serene, the daughter of one of Eilers’s childhood friends. In the artists’ eyes, she represents the perfect synthesis between their individual visual practices. She regularly participates in their artistic work as a “third body” and sometimes leads their performances. Through their alter ego KAYA, Brätsch and Eilers engage in a multi-faceted artistic practice: using everyday objects, they create hybrid works that are located at the intersection of the visual arts, performance, and installation.

Title Unit 3D (Pure Rok)

Date 2017

Materials Urethane, pigment, enamel

Dimensions 139.7 × 85.7 × 22.9 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Café Mater exhibition, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 29 Mar. 2022 to 31 Dec. 2023

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

The painter Kerstin Brätsch and sculptor Debo Eilers have been producing works together under the name KAYA since 2010. KAYA functions as an entity in its own right, beyond the individual practices of the two artists. At the crossroads between visual and performing arts, KAYA’s work breathes new life into old objects from daily life, ceremony or ritua—furniture from the shared shower room of the artists’ studios, graffiti, S&M objects, coins, etc. Unit 3D (Pure Rok) represents at once a see-through resin shower stall and stained glass, with its enamelled colours. The diamond pattern also evokes a Harlequin costume. At once painting, sculpture and partition, this hybrid work offers a fresh, dripping, and unusual take on a presumably hygienic space.

Audrey Pellerin

Morag Keil

Date and place of birth: 1985, Edinburgh, Scotland Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Morag Keil uses techniques as diverse as painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Her recent installations made up of found objects— nail polish, backpacks, female models, cables, etc.—are a critique of the society of the spectacle and the clichés of capitalism that are reflected in the devices of mass media and advertising.

Born in 1985 in Edinburgh, Morag Keil studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 2002 to 2006, then at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London from 2008 to 2009. She received the Dewar Art Award 2008–2009 and the 2010 Lafayette Prize.

Title Virginia Ham

Date 2011

Materials Wood, tape, organic materials, plastic, various media

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Based on found objects, Morag Keil’s installations are always a form of social critique. Made up of rails, tyres, fencing, abandoned personal items and different forms of debris, this delineated, off-limits zone seems to have been the setting for some sort of traumatic event, perhaps a crime or accident. Several portraits scattered on the ground may pay homage to victims—all women. This work is actually about violence toward women and the desire to control their bodies. Indeed, the title of the work refers to a vulgar expression used by the singer Marilyn Manson to speak of the vagina. The photographs that respond to the floor installation show, in the vein of many advertisements show women without faces, amputated of their identity and framed by watercolours of flowers—some stereotypical images of virginity.

Ian Kiaer

Date and place of birth: 1971, London, United Kingdom

Lives and works between London and Oxford, United Kingdom

Ian Kiaer’s artistic practice is driven by a utopian and experimental approach. For several years, he has been developing the Endnote, Tooth project, which he presents in various forms. He draws inspiration from the concepts of the urban planner Moshe Safdie and the utopian architect Frederick Kiesler, notably his theory of “correlation” and from his project Tooth House from the end of the 1940s in the shape of a human tooth that was never completed. Kiaer creates his paintings, sculptures, and installations from manufactured or found materials, blurring the boundary between intentionality and chance.

Born in 1971 in London, Ian Kiaer graduated from University College London (1995). He also holds a master’s degree in painting (2000) and a doctorate from the Royal College of Art (2008) on the house as a model of thought. He lives and works between London and Oxford.

Title Endless House Project: Ulchiro Endnote / Pink

Date 2008

Materials Pink taffetas, acrylic paint, ink, manga, plastic, stretcher

Dimensions 208 × 140 × 3 cm (large canvas) 87 × 60 × 3 cm (small canvas)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Archéologies contemporaines

Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard

from 01 Jun. to 14 Oct. 2012

Nothing Personal, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris

from 08 Jan. to 16 Mar. 2011

Ian Kiaer – Endless House Project, Alison Jacques Gallery, London from 13 Oct. to 13 Nov. 2004

Inspired by utopian architecture—in particular the “infinite” biomorphic structures of Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965)—, Ian Kiaer offers a reflection on the plurality of nuances that make up the real. He arranges a constellation of elements and fragmentary compositions of varying scales ranging from miniature model to large pictorial and flat surfaces. Based on what already exists, these disparate elements gel to form a coherent narrative—notably in Endless House Project: Ulchiro Endnote/Pink in the metrics of Japanese manga. Here, Kiaer borrows a code specific to this graphic art form: according to tradition, a blotch of black ink on a pink ground signals the end of the narrative weave, and its completion in a controlled, abstract gesture.

Ian Kiaer

Title Arretche Studio Project

Date 2012

Materials Slide projector, glass, cardboard and plastic model, screen, rubber, fabric on stretcher

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Les Prairies, FRAC Bretagne, Rennes from 15 Sep. to 09 Dec. 2012

Title Endnote, Tooth, Circle

Date 2017

Materials Acrylic, varnish, Plexiglas

Dimensions 125 × 128 cm (each)

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Endnote, Tooth, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris from 05 Apr. to 27 May 2017

As part of the exhibition Les Prairies at the FRAC Bretagne, the artist was interested in the former telecommunications centre designed by Louis Arretche and completed in 1972. This important building embodies a confidence in the modernist architectural model already in place in the 1970s, as indicated by the building’s retrofuturistic aesthetic. Its scale, in contrast to a forward-looking and reflective “paper architecture”, provoked the artist into a power struggle, prompting him to think about other modes of production. By recovering and using original windows, Ian Kiaer was able to reconsider this architectural project as a proposal and a ruin that he interprets with his own language, in relation to the architect’s archives, through the creation of paintings, models, and projections.

The quasi-monochrome white diptych Endnote, Tooth, Circle is a fraction of a much larger project. The work consists of two stretched paper squares coated with multiple layers of paint and covered with a piece of Plexiglas from an abandoned bus shelter. By integrating this found and already damaged object, Ian Kiaer highlights the vulnerability and fallibility that resides in each work. Like a beacon of light, the light green sun attracts and focuses the eye, radiates and passes through the work. Kiaer questions the existence of forms and human perception by creating a work that is timeless, indefinable, and removed from reality, where the absence of narrative offers the viewer infinite possibilities for recomposition. This piece from the Endnote, Tooth project functions as an experimental arrangement which precedes the materialization of thought. In his deconstruction process, the artist uses the fragment or sample to question notions of totality and permanence.

Oriane Poret

Ian Kiaer

Title Endnote, Tooth, Tooth

Date 2017

Materials Acrylic, ink, varnish, paper, Plexiglas

Dimensions 94.5 × 64.5 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Endnote, Tooth, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris from 05 Apr. to 27 May 2017

A two-tone painting with a visual language that is incomprehensible at first glance, the work Endnote, Tooth, Tooth is a fragment of a much larger piece. It consists of multiple coats of paint on paper and a piece of Plexiglas from an abandoned bus shelter. By affixing this found and already damaged object, Ian Kiaer highlights the vulnerability and fallibility present in each work. He creates a timeless work, beyond reality, indefinable and off-centre, forming a narrative void that only the viewer can recompose. This piece from the Endnote, Tooth project functions as an experimental arrangement which precedes the materialization of thought. In his deconstruction process, the artist uses the fragment or sample to question notions of totality and permanence. Taking artistic utopianism as his starting point, Ian Kiaer combines painting as a “minor form” with the duality between interior and exterior that is characteristic of architecture.

Oriane Poret

Tarik Kiswanson

Date and place of birth: 1986, Halmstad, Sweden

Lives and works in Paris, France

Tarik Kiswanson’s work encompasses sculpture, poetry, photography, performance, and video. His artistic practice outlines a fluid and shifting politics of identity that reflects the cultural diversity, exile, and interbreeding that have marked the artist’s personal life and career. Immersed in the issues of the border and the in-between, his work seeks to merge Eastern and Western traditions, art and design, or object and sculpture in an attempt to become part of a form of collective history.

Born in 1986 in Halmstad, Tarik Kiswanson is a Swedish artist of Palestinian origin. He studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London before graduating from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris in 2014.

Title As Deep As I Could Remember, As Far As I Could See Date 2018

Materials Costumes

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2018

Exhibitions Performa 19 Biennal, Performa – Performance festival in NYC, New York from 21 to 24 Nov. 2019

As Deep As I Could Remember, As Far As I Could See, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 17 to 20 May 2018

This performance was presented for the first time in 2018 at Lafayette Anticipations, then produced again in 2019 in New York as part of the Performa biennial. For this performance, a group of eleven-year-olds moves freely among the audience reciting passages from a text written by Tarik Kiswanson. These short poems, which combine childhood questions with adult reflections, create a polyphonic soundtrack while evoking in depth the issues of exile, borders, and diversity. The artist has an intimate relationship with writing: he began writing at the age of eleven, which he describes as “the forgotten age of childhood,” when he began to understand “what race, class, privilege and poverty mean.” Kiswanson conceived this performance as a total work of art by integrating kinetic sculptures with which the children interact, as well as designing his own costumes inspired by traditional Middle Eastern clothing and Western sportswear.

Marianne Tricoire

Tarik Kiswanson

Title Father Form

Date 2017

Materials Mirror-polished steel

Dimensions 415 × 95 × 95 cm

Acquisition date 2018

Exhibitions Nido, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City from 30 Mar. to 18 Jun. 2023

Tarik Kiswanson, Mirrobody, Carré d’art-Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes from 30 Oct. 2020 to 26 Sep. 2021 As Deep As I Could Remember, As Far As I Could See, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 17 to 20 May 2018

يدلاول روھزلا Flowers for my father, Galerie Carlier | Gebauer, Berlin from 16 Sep. to 16 Nov. 2017

Tarik Kiswanson designed this polished steel sculpture for a solo exhibition at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. The oblong and tapered shape of this large sheet metal mobile responded to the vaulted ceilings and Cistercian architecture of the former sacristy. The artist spent several weeks polishing these metal strips for them to take on the appearance of a mirror and reflect their surroundings. He sought to create a special relationship between the imposing architecture of the sacristy and the body and the gaze of the spectators, who are invited to enter the sculpture and play with the lines of mirrored steel to see their own reflection multiply. This suspended sculpture exerts a strange attraction that owes much to the ambiguity of its form and its title Father Form: at once light and enveloping, it invites us to take refuge in it as if in a cocoon, while its long, tapering metal blades evoke a kind of futuristic cage or prison.

Marianne Tricoire

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Date and place of birth: 1977, French Guiana, France Lives and works in Sète, France

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc imbues his work with a militant quality through his involvement in the preservation and documentation of the memories of populations marked by colonization. His creations are based on extensive research and are expressed through several different media (drawing, sculpture, photography, video). The artist thus brings to light the spaces deliberately left empty by history as written by the Western powers. These gaps, now documented and seen through the prism of the artistic gaze, can be filled and serve as a basis for reflection for the construction of identities and cultures.

Born in 1977 in French Guiana, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc studied at the École supérieure d’art et de design Marseille-Méditerranée.

Winner of the Bâloise prize in 2015, he co-manages the Ròt-Bò-Krik publishing house. He lives and works in Sète (France).

Title Sans titre (des corps entassés)

Date 2012

Materials Cast metal. Five copper bars cast from ten Katanga crosses dating from the early twentieth century

Dimensions 180 × 1.5 × 1.5 cm (each bar)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods, Estancia Femsa – Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City from 21 Sep. to 15 Dec. 2019

Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles from 06 Jan. to 01 Jun. 2018

Tous, des sangs-mêlés, MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine from 22 Apr. to 03 Sep. 2017

Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie

CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux from 22 Jan. to 03 May 2015

Five metal bars 180 centimetres long are placed against a white wall. The minimalist and pure aspect of this work contrasts with its title. The “piled bodies” here evoke the massacres perpetrated by Belgian colonists in the nineteenth century to take control of the copper mines in Katanga (Democratic Republic of Congo). These same mines were at the heart of the 1960 civil war in the same region. The metal bars were obtained by transforming small copper crosses that were once used as currency in Katanga. The melting of these crosses, a gesture imbued with a strong symbolic power, echoes the violence of European colonization. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc aims to “unshackle the gaze” of the audience and to bring them to consider the full measure of the reality of colonization and above all of its consequences. The artist reminds us here that copper, as a material, cannot be perceived in a neutral way as its history is marked by a violence still contained in the exposed metal rods.

Audrey Pellerin

Per/Form. How to do things with[out] words

CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo de Madrid, Madrid from 22 Mar. to 21 Sep. 2014

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Title Names and surnames

Date 2012–13

Materials Photograph printed in black-and-white, framed

Dimensions 44 × 29 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux from 22 Jan. to 03 May 2015

Title Secteur IX, B

Date 2015

Materials Video

Dimensions 41 minutes 58 seconds

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc: Mefloquine Dreams, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt from 19 Nov. to 08 Jan. 2016

All the World’s Futures – Venice Biennale 2015, Venice from 09 to 22 Nov. 2015

Chimen chyen, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris from 17 Sep. to 07 Nov. 2015

This photographic print depicts a bed on which small copper crosses called handa are placed on bubble wrap. This photograph evokes the process of creation of Sans titre (des corps entassés), another work by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc also held in the Lafayette Anticipations foundation. The image also complements the documentary film An Italian Film (Africa Addio) which details the history of these crosses, from their manufacture at an unknown date until their transformation in early 2010 in a foundry in Scotland. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc acquired these handa on eBay. Although these objects now attract the attention of private collectors, their manufacture was once reserved for a selection of initiated men from the Katanga region (Democratic Republic of Congo). The crosses cast by members of this group nicknamed “copper eaters” were used as currency. The more copper they contained, the greater their value. These men then lost control of the mines due to Belgian colonization and stopped passing on their knowledge. The artist, through his work, helps to bring this past and this memory back to life.

Audrey Pellerin

Secteur IX, B is a video work rooted in Michel Leiris’ “L’Afrique fantôme”. What was meant to be a historiographer’s work on the Dakar-Djibouti mission became a diary of an observer asserting his subjectivity as an ethnographer and man of letters. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc has seized upon Leiris’ freedom of writing to address the question of the accuracy of scientific discourse. Betty, the protagonist of Secteur IX, B and a researcher working on the memory of the mission, embodies the artist’s interest in writing about the relationships between peoples, their objects and their archives. The complexity of memory work emerges in this video work through the researcher’s gestures and emotions, as well as through the prism of museums and their collections, which constitute both a desired impartial heritage and biases in a culture. Keeping “neither too far nor too close” says Betty, understanding the foundations of a culture without influencing its actors, grasping cultural identity to avoid collective amnesia—these are all issues of anthropology and postcolonial studies with which Secteur IX, B is steeped.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Title To Charm Guns and Other Arms

Date 2022

Materials Heliogravure on hahnemühle paper 320 g

Dimensions 60 × 78 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions

To Charm Guns and Other Arms is a heliogravure reproduction of the first page of a prayer book, prayers for protection that Joseph Bernes, a gold prospector from Saint Lucia who came to Guyana in the 1930s, patiently copied down so that he could live in peace in the Amazon rainforest. Traces of this prayer can be found in a collection published in 1820 by John George Hohman, and its sacred character is enhanced by the technique of heliogravure printing, which echoes light as a manifestation of the divine presence in Christianity. The prayer originated in the Creole Christian Pow-Wow theology practised by the indigenous populations of Pennsylvania and repressed between 1880 and 1934. The work is part of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s multidisciplinary approach as an artist, researcher, exhibition curator, and film programmer, as well as his decolonial approach. His subjective approach as an artist raises this text to the status of a work of art, bringing out of oblivion a cultural testimony which had been almost entirely suppressed until the end of the twentieth century.

Alicja Kwade

Date and place of birth: 1979, Katowice, Poland

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Alicja Kwade’s work explores the notions of space and time, the finite and the infinite. Although her creations do not purport to provide answers to the questions that stir up our anxieties, they nevertheless propose to accompany our reflections with a distinctive aesthetic sense. Alicja Kwade’s sculptures and installations are often set in a monumental space in which geometric forms evoke the cosmos, nature, the passing of time, or the movement of the planets. Her refined and often poetic structures are constructed with great scientific rigour.

Born in 1979 in Katowice, Alicja Kwade is a graduate of the University of Arts in Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.

Title Sign

Date 2013

Materials Mirror, wood, brass

Dimensions 180 × 96 × 100 cm

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions

The work Sign presents a mirror framed in wood hanging on a white wall. Its surface reflects a pile of objects in a studio with a window at the back. This production makes use of Alicja Kwade’s favoured materials—glass, wood, and metal. The mirror photographed in this way sees its original function transformed. More than a reflection of the composition, it acts as a frame into which a painting has been inserted. Its isolated position on the white wall accentuates this illusion by referencing the hanging of paintings in museums, a presentation that disorients the audience’s gaze. Sign thus preserves a great mystery characteristic of Alicja Kwade’s work and her interest in aporias (from the ancient Greek aporos, meaning “without passage”), those philosophical or scientific theories to which it is absolutely impossible to provide an answer.

Audrey Pellerin

Eva L’Hoest

Date and place of birth: 1991, Liège, Belgium

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Eva L’Hoest’s videos and installations explore memory and its digital materialization. By appropriating contemporary technologies such as the 3D scanner, the MRI, or artificial intelligence, her works question the way in which mental images can be materialized in a technological form. Eva L’Hoest thus undertakes an electronic analysis of reality that transforms and disembodies forms and figures to offer another perception of the world.

Born in Liège in 1991, Eva L’Hoest studied at the Académie royale des beaux-arts de Liège. Her work has been exhibited at WIELS in Brussels, the Riga Biennial, and the Malmö Konstmuseum. Since 2018, her films have been screened at the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. She lives and works in Brussels.

Title Under Automata

Date 2017

Materials Single-channel full HD video

Dimensions 4 minutes 1 seconds

Acquisition date 2020

Exhibitions SIGNAL - Espace(s) Réciproque(s), La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille from 17 Jun. to 25 Oct. 2020

Biennale de l’Image Possible, BIP, La Boverie, Liège from 17 Feb. to 01 Apr. 2018

Captured with a scanner, the video Under Automata shows sleeping passengers on board a long-haul flight. Eva L’Hoest uses a sideways tracking shot to record a moment in which nothing happens. She uses a process taken from the video game industry—the 3D scanner— leveraging its ability to record reality and revealing its full artistic potential. This anthropometric tool only partially recomposes the shots it records, thus creating multiple incomplete visions of the image. The bodies decompose, merging with the seats and the décor to create a vision of a night flight which Eva L’Hoest plays with, taking advantage of these poetic “failures.” Her analysis of reality transforms this contemporary and banal scene, deconstructing it and transporting it outside of time to create a new perception shaped by contemporary technologies. In 2018, she designed another version of Under Automata in virtual reality entitled Under Automata VR Game

Susana Danilovic

Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux

Date and place of birth: 1950, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux explores art and its boundaries by juggling the poetic and the absurd. Close to popular art, he ignores conventions and their seriousness in order to better question the very status of the work by confronting traditional art with the grotesque and the ridiculous. He recognizes the influence of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg. The questions that Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux raises on the place of art in society are also reminiscent of the approach of the Fluxus movement. The artist thus blurs the values of traditional art and does away with any hierarchy between each of the constituent components of his own installations.

Born in 1950 in Paris, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris. He lives and works in Paris.

Fantômette aux bains-douches is part of Arnaud LabelleRojoux’s effort to step away from artistic conventions. For him, the creative process and the reflection that accompanies it take precedence over the finished work. With childlike freedom, a small anthropomorphic sculpture is half-covered by a towel. The viewer is free to imagine the subject of this concealment. Fantômette, the heroine of the Bibliothèque Rose collection whose adventures were published for fifty years, is a nod to childhood that everyone can understand. Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux mocks the classical statuary of the naked woman in the bath by replacing it with a child’s character in the public baths. This work allows him to attack the preconceived ideas and clichés of classical art by drawing on collective.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

Tarek Lakhrissi

Date and place of birth: 1992, Châtelleraut, France

Lives and works between Paris, France and Brussels, Belgium

Combining text, performance, film, and installation, Tarek Lakhrissi’s multidisciplinary work is part of the power struggle of intersectionality. Influenced by feminist and queer authors such as Elsa Dorlin, Jean Genet, Monique Wittig, and José Esteban Munoz, Tarek Lakhrissi tackles political and social issues relating to language, notions of normality and strangeness, magic and love, in works in which identity appears as a social construct.

Born in 1992 in Châtellerault, Tarek Lakhrissi is a Franco-Moroccan artist with a degree in modern literature from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and in art history from the Université de Montréal. He currently lives between Paris and Brussels.

This installation, reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s mobiles or Joan Miro’s canvases, was commissioned for Elfi Turpin’s exhibition Un couteau sans lame et dépourvu de manche held at the CRAC Alsace (Centre rhénan d’art contemporain) in 2019 to a soundtrack produced in collaboration with Ndayé Kouagou. The music, which conjures up contemporary figures of female warriors from popular culture (TV series theme music), accompanies a work inspired by Monique Wittig’s utopian novel Les Guérillères (1969) about a community of lesbian women. In the mauve tones of feminism, Tarek Lakhrissi’s spears and arrows evoke the idea of struggle, while their suspension in space is a metaphor for language’s emancipatory dimension. The work also takes on the form of the novel, with its short paragraphs inspired by the medieval chanson de geste, a type of text with a military plot.

Louise Glodt-Chauchoy

Oliver Laric

Date and place of birth: 1981, Innsbruck, Austria Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Oliver Laric’s research explores new technologies of production, reproduction, and distribution. His sculptures, installations, and online projects focus on the productive potential of copying and remixing and their role in the formation of visual cultures. In the course of a production residency at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris in 2015, he studied various techniques of sculptural reproduction prefiguring 3D scanning technology. In this way, Olivier Laric highlights photosculpture, a little-known technique invented and patented by the engineer François Willème in 1860, which made it possible to produce a highly realistic sculpture in less than two days.

Born in 1981 in Innsbruck, Oliver Laric graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2005). He exhibited at the Vienna Secession in 2016 and at the Kunsthalle Winterthur in 2017. Two solo exhibitions were devoted to him in 2018: at the Metro Pictures gallery in New York and at S.M.A.K., the municipal museum of contemporary art in Ghent.

Title Resemblance by Contact

Date 2016

Materials Diasec

Dimensions 180 × 272 × 0.5 cm (Diasec panel) 180 × 272 × 4 cm (with backing)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Anarchéologies, Centre Pompidou, Paris from 14 Jun. to 11 Sep. 2017

Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

For the exhibition Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, the artist produced a very large photograph entitled Resemblance by Contact, which brings together the results of his work in various Parisian museums (Carnavalet, Guimet, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine). The artist provides the museum with access to his equipment, manpower, and the high-resolution file of the sculpture. In exchange, he is free to use the file to model or 3D print his own versions of the sculpture, or to upload them to http://threedscans.com/, where the scans are freely available. Like the works created by Oliver Laric from this raw material, this site defies any temporal, dimensional, or formal hierarchy, and connects works belonging to different registers such as commemoration, propaganda, or education. In addition to promoting the democratization and circulation of cultural goods, the artist’s online intervention encourages their reuse and redistribution outside the fields of art and heritage by amateurs, artists, and other open-source enthusiasts.

Work produced by Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette for the exhibition Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, October 2016

Guillaume Leblon

Date and place of birth: 1971,

Lille, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Guillaume Leblon is first and foremost a sculptor, working with copper as well as wood, ceramic, as well as plaster. According to Marianne Lanavère, he is one of those artists who “prefer to refer to pictorial abstraction, modern architecture, American sculpture of the 1960s, conceptual art, process art, structuralist cinema… to develop approaches which, although formally distant, stem from the same conception: the work of art as a clue, no matter how tenuous, which is capable of evoking a whole range of references, a construction, a history, a universe.” (Marianne Lanavère, introduction to Guillaume Leblon’s monograph, Les Presses du réel, 2004).

Born in 1971 in Lille, Guillaume Leblon studied at the École des Beaux-arts de Lyon until 1997 before attending the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He was awarded the Altadis prize in 2005. Guillaume Leblon lives and works in Paris.

Title Landscape

Date 2003

Materials

Dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Azimut, FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon

from 24 Jan. to 27 Mar. 2004

Often consisting of unstable materials or found, fragmented and reassembled objects, the works of Guillaume Leblon refuse to be set in stagnant representation. As extensions, deformations, and revelations of what is real, they dwell in the elastic scales of time and space. While the works are often assimilated by architecture, the artist stays here well away from monumentalism. Smoke slowly infiltrates the exhibition space, like a presence hovering on the threshold of appearance and disappearance. A creeping landscape, a sea of condensed clouds, the natural phenomenon reenacted here goes from the sublime romantic to the tiny manifestation of constructed space. Volatile and unstable, the work resists the idea of eternity offered by a museum-sanctuary setting, and reveals the invisible interstices through which the exterior can subtly contaminate the interior.

Maggie Lee

Date and place of birth: 1987, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

The prolific artist Maggie Lee’s aesthetic is characterized by its fluidity—a low-tech, experimental collage in which she uses her life as artistic material. By exploring artefacts of memory and everyday archives, she studies universal affects by collecting clues which she distills in a restrained, dreamlike manner, thereby creating a strange sensation of simultaneous remembering and forgetting. However, Maggie Lee does not give in to nostalgia. While her installations display a rare sincerity, they reactivate synesthetic sensations in the present: sounds, smells, lights, touch, colours, and glitter help celebrate that which is no longer.

Born in 1987 in the United States, Maggie Lee is a graduate of the Pratt Institute in New York. Her first documentary film, Mommy (2015), was critically acclaimed for its tactility and evocative power. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Maggie Lee’s autobiographical body of work consists of collages of images and objects. Her works form an intimate material journal that retraces the evolution of a young girl who grew up in the punk, skater, tomboy, and hardcore alternative cultures of the 1990s in the USA. Made up of iron wire and a handful of trinkets that children often treasure and keep, the suspended heart has a photograph of an East Village apartment in New York City on one side, and a list of erotic practices experienced by friends of the artist on the other. The title of the work is from a song by Peaches, the queen of electroclash in the 1990s, whose lyrics have a strong sexual connotation. This ornament, similar to a mobile, at once naïve and trash, evokes that pivotal moment when the budding adult still co-exists somewhat with the child.

Daniel Lefcourt

Date and place of birth: 1975, New York, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Within the framework of a pluridisciplinary approach which combines sculpture and painting, Daniel Lefcourt questions the process of image production while deconstructing the status of painting. By manipulating new technologies such as digital photography or 3D modelling, he combines different types of image to confront the virtual with the physical reality of materials. The resulting works are imbued with mystery, at the intersection of abstraction and figuration.

Born in 1975 in New York, Daniel Lefcourt holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in New York. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He lives and works in New York.

Cast is a relief painting on canvas that combines digital photography, 3D modelling, and sculpture. Although it appears to represent a microscopic life form, it is actually an abstraction resulting from a multi-layered experimental creative process. This work, produced as part of a large series, was made from a rough pigment surface modelled in 3D and scanned by Daniel Lefcourt using photogrammetry software. The resulting digital image was then transferred to a painting on canvas in relief by means of a foam moulding made from the 3D model. Cast focuses on the material by confronting the virtual with the physical reality of the materials and the images that materialize in them. Somewhere between sculpture and painting, the work questions the production of images and the status of painting, whose limits it aspires to go beyond through the use of digital technology.

Suzana Danilovic

Lawrence Lemaoana

Date and place of birth: 1982, Johannesburg, South Africa

Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa

Lawrence Lemaoana’s work deals with the current socio-political situation in his country, evoking the complexity of post-apartheid society. He frequently uses kanga, a “traditional” South African fabric, which he enriches through embroidered texts or images. Made in the Netherlands, manufactured in China, and then imported into South Africa, the kanga embodies the globalized commercial exchanges that existed prior to the relationships of domination instituted by colonization. Through his artistic reappropriation, the artist weaves a link between history, text, and textiles.

Born in 1982 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he lives and works, Lawrence Lemaoana graduated from the University of Johannesburg School of Fine Arts in 2007.

You Shall Have No Other Saviour Before Me is part of a series consisting of embroideries on kanga begun in 2008. The combination of black, red, and white recalls Russian propaganda posters and the former presence of the USSR in the country’s politics. The colours of the letters (black, yellow, green) are those of the socialist party African National Congress. The artist invokes both the advertising and activist aspects of slogans, a form of language widely used in political statements, the media, and protests. By intertwining these symbols, the artist develops a critique of official South African discourse. The slogan of the work is a pastiche of God’s second commandment to Moses in the Old Testament (“You shall have no other gods before Me”). Lawrence Lemaoana thus uses the same process as the political class, which hijacks and instrumentalizes religious messages.

Léonie Maton

Title You Shall Have No Other Saviour Before Me

Sam Lewitt

Date and place of birth: 1981, Los Angeles, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Sam Lewitt’s work, which includes sculptures and installations, questions the communication systems we use. His recent work focuses on integrated circuits to highlight a form of information flow that is cognitively elusive. Using industrial materials and techniques, Sam Lewitt materializes the circulation of flows and energies while expressing a critique of the capitalist system that is prevalent throughout his work.

Born in 1981 in Los Angeles (USA), Sam Lewitt studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the Whitney Museum. He currently teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in New York. He lives and works in New York.

Title Bundled Main Board Flex Cable Ribbon Connection Membrane for Sony XPERIA Miro ST23/ST23i Lineament

Date 2015

Materials Asphaltum, steel, plastic, copper

Dimensions 248.5 × 71.1 × 16.5 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Triennale Art & Industrie Chaleur humaine, Triennale de Dunkerque, LAAC, Lieu d’Art et Action Contemporaine, Dunkirk from 10 Jun. 2023 to 07 Jan. 2024

How information is transmitted in industrial societies is a subject of interest to Sam Lewitt. Based on his observations, he made a series of sculptures and installations including Bundled Main Board Flex Cable Ribbon Connection for Sony XPERIA Miro ST23/ST23i Lineament. Consisting of copper sheets on plastic supports, this artefact traces the route that our singular words and desires follow. To make it, Sam Lewitt turned to industrial materials used to manufacture electronic circuits. However, these devices, made in series and supposedly infallible, can never transmit information perfectly. Thus the image of a pen is conjured, reminiscent of an obsolete way of transmitting writing, thoughts and memory. The work shines a light on the failure of language, despite its technologization, by the mechanization of communication.

George Henry Longly

Date and place of birth: 1978, London, United Kingdom Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

George Henry Longly’s multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, video, music, and performance. He draws parallels between art history and the fashion industry with a creative method that is more akin to an industrial design process. Through various presentation systems he creates fully immersive artworks and new environment in which visitors must orient themselves. The humorous titles of his works are intriguing, as are his geometric sculptures that echo the shapes of the exhibition spaces.

George Henry Longly’s installation consists of mirrors, a vintage magazine, and rubber stoppers. The mirror is fixed to the wall while the magazine is half-open on the floor. As the two pieces of rubber are equidistant from the mirror and the gap between them is the width of the mirror, the magazine is trapped in the middle of an invisible square on the floor. Because of the presence of the mirror, the work changes its appearance depending on the viewer’s position. George Henry Longly engages with the dimensions of the exhibition space by integrating geometric shapes into his work. The humorous title seems to have no direct connection with the work and the viewer must use their imagination to find one. A lover of puns, the artist adopts the same approach in his work Two Thirds of Visitors Proceed Directly to the Sorting Game (2005).

Rosanne Moulin

Title The push button is trivial, permanent illumination would be preferable

George Henry Longly

Title Two thirds of visitors proceed directly to the sorting game

Date 2005

Materials Plasterboard, screws

Dimensions 180 × 90 × 1.3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 7, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 06 Oct. 2011 to 07 Jan. 2012

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Using basic materials such as plasterboard, George Henry Longly creates a life-size sculpture that seems to be awaiting a body that has yet to arrive. This minimal structure directly engages with the physical space of the gallery: the artist intervenes directly on the wall, taking into account three dimensions of the space (the two walls that form an angle and the floor), but hollowed out. As if in response to the object’s dry quality, the title is loquacious, although it has no direct connection with the piece. It is up to the viewer to try to bridge the gap between the two.

Rachel MacLean

Date and place of birth: 1987, Edinburgh, Scotland

Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland

Rachel MacLean graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. She uses a variety of technologies and sources—characters filmed against a green screen, memes, and videos taken from the Internet—to create a series of imaginary tales, combining historical narrative and futuristic projection within computer-generated landscapes. Her work explores identity, social relations, and politics, using a range of strange characters that she herself embodies to create a body of work that questions the permanence of identity, the violence of social relations, and the political regulation of society.

Title Feed Me

Date 2015

Materials HD video, H.264 and ProRes formats, colour, sound

Dimensions 60 minutes

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

British Art Show 8 — Edinburgh, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh from 12 Feb. to 08 May 2016

British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds from 09 Oct. 2015 to 10 Jan. 2016

British Art Show 8 - Norwich

Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich from 24 Jun. to 04 Sep. 2016

Rachel MacLean’s fiction takes fairy tales and horror films as a point of departure for exploring the collective unconscious. After having written the screenplay and chosen all the scenery for Feed Me, the artist shot a series of characters that she interpreted herself in an impressive exercise of transformations. The film features an innocent little girl, fantastical monsters and a devious Pygmalion in what seems like a golden age. But things quickly degenerate into the commercial exploitation and sexualization of childhood, and the indulgence of every desire. At the same time, the artist lambasts adulthood, unable to resist the infantilization of its tastes and behaviours. Rachel MacLean uses a saturation of aesthetics designed to fascinate, but the eye can still detect the bitter portrait of a greedy and treacherous society hiding behind the excessive cuteness of the emojis.

Liz Magor

Date and place of birth: 1948, Winnipeg, Canada

Lives and works in Vancouver, Canada

Liz Magor questions our intimate relationships with the objects and products of consumer society that surround us—such as by giving a second life to second-hand clothes or old blankets—in order to reveal their emotional, sentimental, and social charge. Her ontological explorations deal with the ordinary and the familiar which she decontextualizes and recontextualizes by associating them with facsimiles of everyday objects. Her work is based on the reuse of artefacts that bear the patina of their experience and the traces of their former use. Liz Magor intervenes on these elements to repair them, to fill in their cracks and wounds without distorting the memory of the society and people that created, used, and then discarded them.

Born in 1948 in Winnipeg, Liz Magor studied at the University of British Columbia and the Parsons School of Design in New York. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Title Phoenix

Date 2013

Materials Wool, plastic, cotton thread, mica sequins

Dimensions 146.1 × 55.9 × 12.7 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Liz Magor, MAMAC de Nice, Nice from 18 Nov. 2017 to 13 May 2018

Liz Magor, MAMAC de Nice, Nice from 03 Jun. to 01 Oct. 2017

Liz Magor: You you you, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, from 18 Feb. to 07 May 2017

The Blue One Comes in Black, Le Crédac, Ivry-Sur-Seine from 09 Sep. to 18 Dec. 2016

Liz Magor questions the physical and emotional relationships we maintain with the objects that surround us in our lives. Phoenix is part of a series made from blankets purchased in second-hand stores. The artist leaves her mark on these textiles, damaged by time and use, by mending tears, fixing snares, and highlighting stains and burns. These imperfections, all reminders of past existences, are carefully thrown into relief, like the Japanese art of kintsugi, which consists of repairing broken ceramics with gold. Sent to be dry-cleaned then presented folded on hangers, still partially protected by a plastic cover, these blankets once provided warmth, softness, and protection to their owners. Now, they are being preserved by the artist.

Audrey Pellerin

Six ways to sunday #06, Peep-Hole, Milan from 23 Sep. to 07 Nov. 2015

L’intruse, Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris from 14 Nov. 2014 to 24 Jan. 2015

No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion

La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille from 12 Oct. 2013 to 02 Feb. 2014

Benoît Maire

Date and place of birth: 1978, Pessac, France Lives and works in Bordeaux, France

Benoît Maire questions the limits of figuration through a visual representation of often philosophical concepts, through installations blending photography, film, sculpture, objects, and writing. He explores the gaps between language and sight, nature and culture, while questioning processes of historical and aesthetic construction. In a call for metaphysical sublimation, his artistic universe tends towards an archaeology of the contemporary word with its inherent contradictions.

Born in 1978 in Pessac, Benoît Maire is a graduate of the Villa Arson in Nice and the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He also followed the post-graduate programme at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He lives and works in Bordeaux.

Title Le concept de Cordélia

Date 2010

Materials Walnut, bronze, glass, oak, wax, terracotta, Super 8mm film, television set, screen

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Le concept de Cordélia is an installation combining sculpture, hybrid furniture borrowed from the kouros, and two monitors broadcasting a video loop seen from the point of view of each protagonist. A reworked extract from L’Île de la Répétition (2010), these dreamlike images shot on Super 8 film present an allegorical dialogue between the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and a young girl named Cordelia in a contemporary living space. The conversation focuses on the feminine ideal embodied by Cordelia, as laid out by the thinker in the fictional Seducer’s Diary inserted in a theoretical treatise. She becomes aware of her virtual condition and, feeling trapped, complains to her creator. The mysterious ancient profile on a pedestal reflects the psychic intimacy of the two characters by appearing in both real and diegetic space. By highlighting sculpture’s potential to represent duality, Benoît Maire explores the limits of the materialization of the concept through its disruptive dimension, between field and counter-field, conscious and unconscious, reason and affect.

Veronica Doszla

Victor Man

Date and place of birth: 1974, Cluj, Romania

Lives and works between Cluj, Romania and Rome, Italy

Victor Man’s sculptures, silkscreen prints, and murals bring together a wide range of materials and tonalities from melancholy to sensuality. As Ève Beauvallet writes, “This co-presence of materials and universes bears witness to a powerful art of the oxymoron” (“Memory-Man”, Mouvement, May 2009). Victor Man’s works also have an overt autobiographical dimension, as they deconstruct both personal and historical mythologies.

Born in 1974 in Cluj, Victor Man lives and works between his native city and Rome.

Title The Deposition

Date 2008

Materials Oil paint, linen canvas

Dimensions 193 × 293.4 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions La Triennale, Intense proximité, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 20 Apr. to 26 Aug. 2012

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

This biblical scene, which takes place in a bourgeois apartment, draws on certain conventions of religious painting while disrupting them. While the three women in turn embody Mary Magdalene, bare-breasted, the Virgin at her child’s side, and Mary of Cleophas alongside the bearded man as Joseph of Arimathea, the devil appears in the background, dangling his sinister snake above the coffin. From this temporal and stylistic collage of accessories, outfits, and poses, an inescapable sense of déjà-vu transpires.

Nicholas Mangan

Date and place of birth: 1979, Geelong, Australia

Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

Although Nicholas Mangan uses a range of techniques, his most recent projects primarily combine video and sculpture. Interested in ecology, post-colonialism, and the conflict between nature and culture, he relates the geopolitical to the cosmogonical, stripping back and deconstructing these themes to make sense of the world.

Born in 1979 in Geelong, Nicholas Mangan studied at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne before completing a two-year residency at the Gertrude Contemporary Gallery in Fitzroy (Australia). He lives and works in Melbourne.

Title Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World

Date 2009–10

Materials Limestone and coral table from the island of Nauru, HD video

Dimensions 45 × 120 × 80 cm (table) 14 minutes 50 seconds (video)

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions New Museum Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York from 25 Feb. to 24 May 2015

Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World, Sutton Gallery, Fitzroy from 29 Jul. to 28 Aug. 2010

Adelaide Biennial: Before and After Science

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Adelaide from 27 Feb. to 02 May 2010

The idea that “the middle of nowhere is the centre of everything” provides the starting point for Nicholas Mangan’s installation Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World, consisting of a film and a limestone table. Here, the Australian artist orchestrates the meeting of long and geological time with the ephemeral nature of human activity. He travelled to the island of Nauru, which, at 21 square kilometres, is the smallest republic in the world, to film the now desolate landscapes of this country with a singular history. Nicholas Mangan presents these images alongside a strange table, a relic of the island’s extractive—and prosperous—past. In order to save the country from imminent bankruptcy, its president had imagined trading in coffee tables made of limestone from what was once a financial windfall—phosphate mining—by presenting them on the American market as made of ancient coral. Nicholas Mangan uses this anecdote to represent the historical and environmental upheavals of this republic, whose economy was based on the extractive industry and which became a tax haven in the early 2000s. Nauru presents the ultimate, delirious escape from decay—or how nature would, with its final breath, happily save its inhabitants from their digressions, mistakes, and predatory activities.

Didier Marcel

Date and place of birth: 1961, Besançon, France

Lives and works in Dijon, France

Didier Marcel’s work is focused mainly on sculpture. He creates installations bringing together various objects, sometimes taken from reality, which he reproduces on a smaller scale in other materials to play with the viewer’s perception. His often surprising sculptures question our relationship and interactions with the surrounding landscape.

Born in 1961 in Besançon, Didier Marcel graduated from the Institut national des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. He continued his training with Pontus Hulten, Sarkis, and Daniel Buren. He now lives and works in Dijon, where he also teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design.

Title White as snow – Sans titre (Tronc coudé) n°²/₅, Sans titre (Plissé) n°²/₅, Sans titre (Tilleul) n°¹/₅, Sans titre (Flammes) n°¹/₅, Sans titre (Colonne) n°²/₅, Sans titre (Entrelacs) n°¹/₅, Sans titre (Hermès) n°¹/₅

Date 2008

Materials Polyester resin moulds, polyamide

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Pop up1 – Didier Marcel, 44 GL, Paris from 14 Dec. 2012 to 08 Mar. 2013

Didier Marcel, Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg from 10 Oct. 2009 to 03 Jan. 2010

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

White as snow is an installation composed of seven moulds in polyester resin flocked with white polyamide. Like a “remaker”, Didier Marcel is inspired by nature and makes moulds from elements found in his environment. The vertical and irregular shape of the moulds is reminiscent of tree trunks, while the polyamide coating evokes the whiteness of snow. He also makes casts of ploughed earth and other elements—natural, from architecture, domestic contexts, or tools—with synthetic materials. Paying close attention to the finish of the work, he seems to seek a realistic texture by focusing on sculptural parameters of material, form, size, and presentation. By introducing his stripped down, uprooted, domesticated, hyper-realistic, and abstract forest into the museum space, the artist invites a new understanding of natural elements.

Margaux Granier

Martin Margiela

Date and place of birth: 1957, Leuven, Belgium

Lives and works in Petit-Enghien, Belgium

Throughout his career as a fashion designer, Martin Margiela has sought to disrupt the conventions of fashion and to create new experiences. He was the first to introduce recycling into his designs, using army socks, broken crockery, thrifted clothing, and plastic packaging, among other things. His outfits show signs of wear and tear and his fashion often goes beyond the boundaries of clothing. In 2008, he decided to move on from fashion just after Maison Martin Margiela’s twentieth anniversary show. Since then, he has devoted himself exclusively to the visual arts, where he continues to work with transformation and diversion.

Born in 1957 in Leuven, Martin Margiela began his fashion studies in 1977 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In 1984, he worked with Jean Paul Gaultier until he launched his own label, Maison Margiela, in 1988. He left it twenty years later in 2008 to devote himself exclusively to the visual arts. He lives and works in Belgium.

Title Monument

Date 2021

Materials PVC sheeting, leather, imitation leather

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2021

Exhibitions Martin Margiela au MWOODS, MWOODS Hutong, Beijing from 15 Jul. to 15 Oct. 2022

Martin Margiela à Lafayette Anticipations, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 20 Oct. 2021 to 02 Jan. 2022

The tarpaulin that visitors discover while reclining on sofas is based on the principle of the large trompe-l’oeil cover placed on monuments undergoing renovation. These simulacra offer a phantasmal vision of a place. A further ghostly presence arises from the sound of a volleyball team’s footsteps from a match played several years ago. Here Martin Margiela erects a monument to transience, to the traces of visible and invisible ghosts that contribute to our experience of the world.

Work produced by Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette for the artist’s solo exhibition in 2021

Helen Marten

Date and place of birth: 1985, Macclesfield, United Kingdom Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Helen Marten takes a humorous approach to changing our perceptions of the world. Through her work, she manipulates socially accepted images to change them and question their place, truthfulness, and weight. Her world makes use of the possibilities offered by the advent of digital technology, which allows her to assemble diverse images and profoundly modify their internal characteristics without altering their appearance. Her works are large “collages” where found objects share the space with creations of her own hand.

Born in 1985 in Macclesfield, Helen Marten is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer. She was awarded the Lafayette Prize in 2011, the LUMA Prize in 2012, as well as the Hepworth Prize and the Turner Prize in 2016. She lives and works in London.

Title No juice about it

Date 2011

Materials Steel, nylon, jute rope, fabric, flowers, powder

Dimensions 90 × 300 × 20 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

No juice about it is reminiscent of a shop window that has been fitted out in anticipation of the summer season. A section of bamboo fencing supports a lei, a hat, and a patchwork quilt. On the floor, an anthropomorphic decorative pineapple is wearing sunglasses. These objects are used here as ready-mades, echoes of images that have become clichés of consumer society, but, in fact, this is a trompe-l’oeil. The fencing and the pineapple are not found and reappropriated objects, but sculptures made by the artist from metallic materials: monochrome aluminium and steel. The coldness of steel replaces the warmth of bamboo wood. The smooth aluminium contrasts with the spikiness of pineapple skin. These transformations are a reminder that the digital world profoundly alters our perception. The combination of these diverse materials is in keeping with the rest of Helen Marten’s work: it creates a certain mystery, but always with a touch of humour.

Audrey Pellerin

Helen Marten

Title Ludic Organs

Date 2011

Materials Steel, screws, wood, varnish, airbrush

Dimensions 36.5 × 29 × 0.4 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Inside the Banana, Algus Greenspon, New York from 25 Jul. to 22 Sep. 2012

Title Every room and suite

Date 2011

Materials Formica, solid maple, nuts

Dimensions 120 × 265 × 6 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions FIAC – 38th edition, Grand Palais, Paris from 20 to 23 Oct. 2011

Helen Marten plays with the everyday objects she reassembles to challenge the traditional order of things. In doing so, she reverses the system of references by which we generally understand objects, offering works that are pushed to the very limits of the functional. Here, in a destabilizing juxtaposition, a photograph of a sheep’s head is transformed into a clock and an advertisement for Benetton. As for the strip of wallpaper, it is a take on an architectural frieze. Placed in a contemporary context, it goes from traditional bas-relief to a two-dimensional image, made from vectorized drawings. Created and laid out according to mathematical logic, circular rather than linear, the motifs seem to draw on an ornamental repertoire from different geographical regions and cultures.

While it is seemingly absent, the sun suggested by the cavity in Every room and suite projects its rays onto the large Formica panel on which various materials are assembled. The moon seems to be reflected in a large blue ocean, while golden nuts evoke as many stars in this celestial microcosm. Helen Marten uses these objects found in nature to express her personal interpretations of the subject. In this large-format work (120 × 265 cm), she presents a cosmogonic sundial where the stars and elements have been moved by the artist’s demiurgic gesture. She has selected and rearranged the elements of the world in such a way as to make them coincide. Every room and suite exudes mystery, even mysticism. The work has a meaning, but it remains hidden, secret, while combining elements of everyday life. This relationship between mystery and everyday life is a constant in Helen Marten’s creations. We find the artist’s taste for mixing elements, reconfiguration and collage.

Audrey Pellerin

Helen Marten

Title Tennis skirt batten board

Date 2011

Materials Solidified ash, nuts, wood, nails made from pine, vinyl, vectorised drawing on cut vinyl, stress ball keyring, powder-coated chains

Dimensions 210 × 305 × 7 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions No borders in a wok that can’t be crossed CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York from 22 Jun. to 22 Sep. 2013

Title Parabolic eyebrow tack on (rather than a signature)

Date 2011

Materials Vectorised drawings digitally printed on wallpaper

Dimensions 120 × 265 × 6 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Tennis skirt batten board is a vectorized drawing printed in large format: the piece measures over two by three metres. Helen Marten depicted a reclining figure whose head is resting on a pillow. Only her head and legs are visible; the rest of the body is hidden under a space created by the assembly of three wooden beams, which suggests a door with nails driven into its frame. Stress toy keyrings are hung on some of them. The figure’s pose recalls a motif that is particularly common in Western painting: the reclining female nude presented to the public’s gaze. Here, Helen Marten reverses the acquired image and brings mystery into play. Is the character a man or a woman? Are they clothed or naked? What about the tennis skirt evoked by the title of the work? The playful aspect of Helen Marten’s artistic approach is on show here. She modifies an old model thanks to the possibilities offered by digital technology, then juxtaposes prefabricated objects and an assembly of pieces of wood with the printed design. This encounter between materials evokes the “collision of surfaces” that the artist experiments with in her work.

Audrey Pellerin

Lucy McKenzie

Date and place of birth: 1977, Glasgow, Scotland

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

From painting to installation, Lucy McKenzie works in a variety of media to create environments inspired by sources as eclectic as Eastern European propaganda murals, Cold War iconography, 1980s pop music, and industrial typography. Appropriating both images and modes of production, she paints in a wide variety of styles, including trompe-l’oeil environments that blur the line between art and design.

Born in Glasgow in 1977, Lucy McKenzie studied at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, Scotland, and then at the Institut supérieur de peinture décorative Van Der Kelen-Logelain in Saint-Gilles, Belgium, where she received the school’s gold medal. Since 2007, she has been running the design studio Atelier E.B with designer Beca Lipscombe. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Artist’s Institute in New York.

Title De Ooievaar bedroom table and carpet

Date 2016

Materials Glass, fabric, wood, wool

Dimensions 79 × 102 cm (table) 136 cm (diam.) 2 cm thickness (carpet)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Biennal of Painting – Inner Spaces, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle from 26 Jul. to 18 Oct. 2020

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

De Ooievaar (Stork Villa), a modernist building in Oostende, was built in 1935 by the Belgian architect and designer Jozef De Bruycker. Inspired by the De Stijl movement and Bauhaus, De Bruycker joined the Flemish avant-garde who created a synthesis of national, political and artistic ideologies. In 2014, Lucy McKenzie bought the villa, where she undertook renovations in collaboration with Belgian artists: the designer Frederik Depuydt helped make a 3D model of the building, the cabinetmaker Laurent Gielis a table and replica chairs, and the company Ora Pro Nobis a carpet. All the while respecting the original materials and design of the house and its furnishings, Lucy McKenzie made subtle modifications in her renovations, turning De Ooievaar into a home appropriated by an artist.

Work produced with the support of Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette for the exhibition Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, October 2016.

Lucy McKenzie

Title Villa De Ooievaar digital render (work in progress)

Date 2017

Materials Film | Edition 3 of 6 + 1 artist’s proof

Dimensions 8 minutes

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Mathieu Mercier

Date and place of birth: 1970, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France Lives and works in Paris, France

Mathieu Mercier’s works question society’s relationship to objects. The artist also encourages a fresh look at the place of beauty and the original artwork in a daily life geared towards mass consumption. His artistic research is conducted without any strategy. Thus, his chosen medium (painting, sculpture, installation) is rarely used for its own qualities, but always in the service of a permanent process of questioning. Mathieu Mercier strives to find a new way of looking at each work: he requires the viewer to go through multiple interpretations that range from collective references to a personal, even introspective reading.

Born in 1970 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Mathieu Mercier graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges in 1994 and from the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques de Paris in 1995. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Euro-palette Standard

Date 2000

Materials Coated MDF

Dimensions 120 × 80 × 16 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris

from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Mathieu Mercier, Sans titres 1993-2007, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 21 Oct. 2007 to 10 Jan. 2008

This melamine palette is a reproduction of a popular device for the distribution of goods. The billions of existing copies are reproduced here as a single unit presented against a wall, as if abandoned after a delivery. As an emblem of the transitory and of transport in reference to a globalized society, Euro-pallet Standard borrows from two worlds that seem not to communicate although they have several common characteristics: the museum and the supermarket. They both classify, name, categorize, and inventory objects. They also share objectives, such as facilitating the flow of information, making it accessible, and developing an audience. Mathieu Mercier interprets this correspondence as the commodity’s challenge to art. The palette is thus stripped of its commercial and use-value, while acquiring a new exchange value. It is therefore not a readymade that would be art’s response to the commodity, nor is it an appropriation by art of what is alien to it. On the contrary, it is evidence of a serene relationship with objects that produces a mutual benefit, emblematic of Mathieu Mercier’s approach.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

Mathieu Mercier

Title Untitled

Date 2006

Materials Wood

Dimensions 240 × 220 × 210 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Des spectres et des automates, Le Dojo, Nice from 20 Jun. to 20 Sep. 2008

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Title Prototype pour une chaise de jardin

Date 2006

Materials Resin

Dimensions 70 × 50 × 48 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris

from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Sans titre 1993–2007, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 14 Nov. 2007 to 29 Feb. 2008

Untitled is a wooden cube painted white with four sides pierced by geometric openings revealing the features of a schematic face. Its colour and expression give it a spectral appearance. The sculpture-face is looked at by the viewer, but it also looks at the exhibition space or its visitors, generating new points of view. Untitled is a mirror-instrument that reflects our own image and mechanisms of interpretation. Mathieu Mercier demands a personal, even introspective reading of the work from the viewer. This white cube also evokes the neutral white layout of the spaces in which was shown in the 1960s.

Rosanne Moulin

Prototype pour une chaise de jardin was made from a standard plastic chair. The artist created irregularly contoured openings in the back and under the armrests using the thermoforming technique, a transformation that gives the object a more anthropomorphic appearance. After an initial test entitled Premier prototype pour une chaise de jardin in 2003, Mathieu Mercier has now produced a new version in resin. Like Marcel Duchamp with his readymades, he uses an everyday consumer product to question the place of the everyday object in art. Prototype pour une chaise de jardin is connected with Deux chaises (2003), a work that presented the designer Gerrit Rietveld’s chair next to a standard plastic garden chair.

Rosanne Moulin

Mathieu Mercier

Title Untitled Date 2007

Materials Fibreglass and resin, metal

Dimensions 210 × 190 × 280 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Sans titre 1993–2007, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 14 Nov. 2007 to 29 Feb. 2008

Untitled is a two-metre high sculpture made of rigid, curved fibreglass shells arranged in a staggered pattern. The assembly of these shapes gives the work the biomorphic appearance of a large round shell. This formless body evokes both a protective envelope and a molecular structure. The ribbings which delimit each shell are reminiscent of intercellular membranes. With humour, Mathieu Mercier creates a polysemous object that confuses the viewer and questions our preconceived ideas. In Untitled, the artist seeks to keep a neutral gaze and asks the same of the viewer, who must make their own subjective reading. This approach is part of a permanent questioning of the utilitarian and symbolic functions of objects.

Rosanne Moulin

Nicole Miller

Date and place of birth: 1982, Tucson, United States Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States

Since the beginning of the 2010s, Nicole Miller’s artistic practice has been essentially film-based—most often documentary video while also extending to sculpture, installation, and interactive light works. The artist’s work focuses on the individuality and trajectory of the people she films, while at the same time reflecting more broadly on the notion of loss or of individual and collective identity.

Born in 1982 in Tucson, Nicole Miller studied at the California Institute of the Arts from 2001 to 2005. She graduated from the USC Roski School of Art and Design - University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 2009. She has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2001.

Title The Borrowers

Date 2014

Materials HD video, 3 screens

Dimensions 16 minutes 52 seconds

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Nicole Miller: The Borrowers, Koenig & Clinton, New York from 19 Mar. to 16 May 2015

This set of three works bordering on documentary video addresses the question of self-representation and explores personal identity as a malleable and always fragmentary notion. It also evokes the idea of loss and absence: in the video entitled David, a man who has lost an arm tries to relieve the phantom pain he feels by creating the illusion of his recovered limb through a play of reflections in a mirror. In the other two videos, Ndinda and Anthony, a woman tries to give a speech but can’t stop laughing nervously and a Jimi Hendrix lookalike covers Nina Simone’s Ain’t Got No / I Got Life on guitar. Nicole Miller’s film work invites the viewer into the heart of the creative process as, in the artist’s own words, “active viewing can be used as a tool to reconstitute personal histories, or even one’s body.”

Marianne Tricoire

Marlène Mocquet

Date and place of birth: 1979, Maisons-Alfort,

Lives and works in Paris, France

France

Marlène Mocquet’s body of work leaves room for textural effects, between dense impasto and translucent washes, in various media such as painting, sculpture, and installation. From pictorial abstraction, colourful scenes emerge populated by long-limbed girls and fantastical characters. The abundant details give rise to a poetic, dreamlike world that invites the viewer to let their imagination run wild. Behind these deceptively naive appearances, Marlène Mocquet’s childlike world is more complex than it appears, oscillating between dream and nightmare.

Born in 1979 in Maisons-Alfort, Marlène Mocquet graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris. She lives and works in Paris.

Title Paysage visage de Dürer

Date 2003

Materials Canvas, wood, staples

Dimensions 65 × 81 × 2.7 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Paysage visage de Dürer depicts a bird plunging towards an oversized face depicted horizontally. The precise black lines of the bird, which seems to be drawn straight from a Dürer engraving, contrast with the wash effects on the face, the artist playing with contrasts in texture and pictorial density. Marlène Mocquet juxtaposes elements of different sizes and misaligns her compositions to disorient the viewer. The face emerges from the abstraction thanks to a few lines representing the mouth, nose, and eye socket. The force of gravity seems to be drawing the bird and make-up on the face downwards. Marlène Mocquet invites us to give free rein to our imagination and to explore this world in all its dimensions, from dream to nightmare.

Valentine Brégeon

Marlène Mocquet

Title La comète

Date 2006

Materials Gouache, paper

Dimensions 32 × 24 cm (work) 36.5 × 28.5 × 1 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Title Moi marchant sur la peinture

Date 2006

Materials Canvas

Dimensions 46.7 × 55.2 × 2 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

At first glance, La comète appears to be a quasi-abstract work: a sheet of immaculate white paper is disrupted only in its lower section by several horizontal streaks of paint. Then, below the comet-like trail, the sketch of a face shaped with a few dots of black paint can be made out. This work embodies the artist’s pictorial process: against a background of pictorial abstraction, figurative elements emerge that develop childlike stories from the characters emerging from the material. The addition of these details gives rise to a mysterious world that escapes the inattentive eye. The artist thus invites the viewer to give free rein to their imagination and to rediscover a childlike gaze.

Valentine Brégeon

A naked figure seems to float on the water in an ethereal universe of bluish hues. Moi marchant sur la peinture is a metaphor for the artistic act, and more specifically for the painter. This character who spreads streaks of white paint as she walks is a self-portrait of Marlène Mocquet. From the blurred background, with a few brushstrokes the artist makes this small, mischievous-looking character emerge and come to life, as if they were playing with the layer of paint. Marlène Mocquet combines tactile matter and more diluted washes to create games of scale that evoke a child’s view of the surrounding environment.

Valentine Brégeon

Marlène Mocquet

Title La ville à l’envers

Date 2007

Materials Canvas

Dimensions 223 × 155 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 7, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 06 Oct. 2011 to 07 Jan. 2012

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Marlène Mocquet, École municipale des beaux-arts | Galerie ÉdouardManet, Gennevilliers from 13 Mar. to 19 Apr. 2007

Title Le poisson violet dans le ciel

Date 2007

Materials Canvas

Dimensions 195 × 130 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

The painting La ville à l’envers depicts a young girl transformed into a giant who occupies three quarters of the composition and seems to be carrying an upsidedown city with tiny skyscrapers in her frail arms. Marlène Mocquet turns the tables and plays with scale, painting an Alice who has eaten the cake. The translucent wash that shapes the girl’s body contrasts with the abundant pictorial layer that constitutes the urban landscape. This city carried at arm’s length represents the artistic act, making the work a self-portrait of the artist—Marlène Mocquet carrying her creation in a precarious balance.

Valentine Brégeon

The painting Le poisson violet dans le ciel juxtaposes a young girl with a slender body and a huge purple fish. The latter is born from a spot of paint by adding a mouth, a nose, and two eyes. As Marlène Mocquet is adept at playing with scale, the fish here appears much larger than the little girl, who is reminiscent of a Lewis Carroll character. The artist also plays with textural effects, combining thick matter with more diluted washes. She evokes a youthful view of the world by turning the tables with this young girl who seems to be floating rather than walking. Conjuring up an imaginary and childlike world, this work invites us to let our imagination run free.

Valentine Brégeon

Marlène Mocquet

Title Les larmes de crocodile

Date 2008

Materials Canvas

Dimensions 200 × 130 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Les larmes de crocodile depicts a young girl with oversized, lanky limbs who stands looking up at a sky filled with blue and pink rain. The drops falling around her have bulging eyes and turn into Lilliputian figures. This work bears witness to the artist’s pictorial process: figurative elements emerge from flows of abstract paint, creating childlike stories. The characters emerge from the material and come to life. Marlène Mocquet also uses contrasts between very soft colours, treated as washes, and denser impastos of matter. She conjures up the world of childhood in all its dimensions, whether dreamlike or nightmarish. The title of the canvas (Crocodile tears) also evokes this childlike world.

Valentine Brégeon

Laurent Montaron

Date and place of birth: 1972, Verneuil-sur-Avre, France Lives and works in Paris, France

Laurent Montaron questions our perception of reality and fiction, time and space. Through his films, installations, and photographs, he puts into perspective the recording and reproduction techniques for both sound and image from the nineteenth century to the present day by appropriating certain devices that have become obsolete. In this way, he brings to the fore the importance of representation techniques that influence and condition our view of the world.

Born in 1972 in Verneuil-sur-Avre, Laurent Montaron studied at the École des Beaux-arts de Reims. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Rounded with a sleep

Date 2006

Materials HD video

Dimensions 4 minutes

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Énigme et déchiffrement / projection during Monumenta

Le Grand Palais, Paris from 27 Jun. to 03 Jul. 2007

Sept/7, Le Plateau FRAC Île-de-France, Paris from 11 Mar. to 07 Apr. 2007

Laurent Montaron, Printemps de septembre, Toulouse from 22 Sep. to 15 Oct. 2006

Laurent Montaron, LMAK Projects, New York from 25 May to 24 Jun. 2006

Action, FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille from 01 to 10 Jun. 2006

The video Rounded with a sleep shows a group of teenagers wandering through a stark natural landscape to the sound of the wind. Together they are engaged in an experiment: playing the choking game. The game consists of inducing fainting, or even hallucinations, through suffocation. The voluntary loss of consciousness between life and death, between the real and the fictitious, blurs all the player’s temporal reference points, as if in a moment suspended outside of time. This dangerous game echoes the youth of the protagonists, themselves on the border between childhood and adulthood. The looped montage of this scene illustrates Laurent Montaron’s vision of the narrative purpose of his works: “The story does not find a resolution at the end of the film, but rather in what the viewer makes of this equation between themselves and the story […] The denouement takes place off-screen.”

Léonie Maton

Rounded with a sleep, Galerie Schleicher+Lange, Berlin from 06 Apr. to 13 May 2006

Laurent Montaron

Title The body of the river knows no boundaries

Date 2008

Materials Rifles, waxed cotton

Dimensions 140 × 25 × 25 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Laurent Montaron, Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes IAC

from 28 Jan. to 15 Mar. 2009

Title Pace

Date 2009

Materials 16mm film, projector, glass display case

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris

from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Laurent Montaron, Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes IAC

from 28 Jan. to 15 Mar. 2009

The installation The body of the river knows no boundaries presents four rifles, recognizable by their butts, wrapped in a rifle rag. The grease that impregnates the textile gives the impression of having mummified these obsolete objects through time. Laurent Montaron exhibits these relics of a past history in the same way as the most precious objects in museums. Here he conceives an “image-object” that questions the relationship between the work and the viewer. The deliberately enigmatic title reflects the importance the artist places on the interpretation of the meaning of his works. Indeed, he conceives his titles as so many clues to be brought together to grasp the global meaning of his work.

Léonie Maton

The film Pace (2009) shows the heart of a carp beating in the palm of a hand. This fixed shot, which is a continuous loop, creates the illusion of a heart beating forever, even though it has been torn from its body. Time is then perceived as infinite, but as the projection progresses, the image of this time loop blurs and fades away. Laurent Montaron also adds a spatial setting to his work: projected behind a display case set into the wall, the work also includes the projector. The artist imposes a distance through the framing of the staging to question what conditions our gaze and our perception of time, from the real to the fictional. The artist pays more attention to the possible experience between the viewer and his work than to the understanding of the latter. The interaction, even if only partial, creates a mise en abyme made possible only by our presence.

Léonie Maton

Jean-Luc Moulène

Date and place of birth: 1955, Reims, France

Lives and works in Saint-Langis-Lès-Mortagne, France

Jean-Luc Moulène’s complex work is built around a practice that analyses and deconstructs reality. The artist asserts the importance of “focusing on what we do not understand” by cultivating areas of shadow and mystery within works that are left open to the viewer’s interpretation. Although he was first recognized for his photographs, his drawings and sculptures now feature more heavily in his exhibitions.

Born in 1955 in Reims, Jean-Luc Moulène has had major solo exhibitions, notably at the Secession in Vienna (2017), the Centre Pompidou (2016), and the Louvre Museum (2005). He has also participated in the Venice Biennale (2019) and the Taipei Biennale (2016). His work has been acquired by major institutions around the world, including MoMA in New York and the Tate Modern in London.

Title Tricolore 2

Date 2015

Materials Glass (Gold Ruby / Brillantgelb / Spring Green), flat irons

Dimensions 44 × 78 × 54 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Objet de tendresse, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 05 to 17 Apr. 2018

In 2015, Jean-Luc Moulène carried out a collaboration with Cirva (International Research Centre for Glass and Plastic Arts) in Marseille. He experimented with this material with Tricolore 2, a blown glass object compressed by a steel structure. The work embodies an imprint of the body, a trace of the worker’s breath constraining the material in order to shape it. At the same time, it evokes important notions in the artist’s language such as disjunction and intersection. Jean-Luc Moulène questions how to form a common space between two elements, in this case glass and steel. According to him, each part exists for itself and remains whole, even when “at the intersection.” The glass and steel of Tricolore 2 thus share a materiality. Their intersection leads to a point of contact with the environment surrounding them thanks to which the work can “be in tune at all its moments, of enunciation as well as of fabrication.”

Léonie Maton

Jean-Luc Moulène

Title Spores 3

Date 2017

Materials Graphite, mushroom spores, cardboard

Dimensions 43 × 36 cm (work) 60.5 × 52.5 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2020

Exhibitions Objets et faits, Centre d’art contemporain – the Delme synagogue, Delme from 08 Jun. to 21 Oct. 2018

En Angle Mort, La Verrière - Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Brussels from 19 Jan. to 31 Mar. 2018

Spores 3 presents a constellation of mushroom imprints that Jean-Luc Moulène collected and arranged on a piece of cardboard. The surface is populated with irregular round shapes that resemble cells, jellyfish, or comets within a stellar landscape. To make this work, the artist placed mushrooms on a sensitised surface and left them to dry overnight. The surface has imprinted their traces and captured the phantom of their past presence. Part of a larger series, Spores 3 is the result of an experimental process that is difficult to control and leaves a lot of room to chance. Although the artist defines a framework, part of the final result is beyond his control. Through an open staging, Jean-Luc Moulène explores the intrinsic qualities of organic matter and reveals its expressive potential. The result is a mysterious work in which the mushroom spores form a cosmic landscape for the viewer to contemplate and reflect upon.

Suzana Danilovic

Nicolas Moulin

Date and place of birth: 1970, Paris, France

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Nicolas Moulin uses video art and photography to create disconcerting environments, devoid of human presence, populated only by the ruins of large-scale modern constructions. Inspired by the science fiction stories of J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, these desolate worlds seem to carry the memory of a fallen utopia in an aesthetic close to that of German romanticism. Using simple techniques such as video embedding, the artist plunges the viewer into familiar but difficult to identify landscapes where timeless architectural constructions stand out as the only vestige of the end of time.

Title Aviafluenza

Date 2005

Materials Aluminium, acrylic paint, wall

Dimensions 90 × 120 × 2.1 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Marked by horizontal lines, these photographs, which showing industrial and minimalist architecture in a natural setting, are characteristic of Nicolas Moulin’s work. As in his famous Vider Paris series, he immerses the viewer in familiar landscapes that have been transformed to give them an enigmatic, post-apocalyptic dimension. Through the building or the perfectly manicured lawn, a human presence can still be felt in this deserted landscape. The artist explores his preferred themes, such as utopian architecture (which he also touches on in his project on the Datchotel Ryugyong), science fiction, and civilisational narratives. The viewer thus becomes the narrator, like the hero of the film Warmdewar discovering a universe populated by the remains of a lost world. Nicolas Moulin’s futuristic work also echoes the current post-pandemic context and climate change.

Louise Glodt-Chauchoy

Nicolas Moulin

Title Warmdewar

Date 2006

Materials Video

Dimensions 18 minutes 57 seconds

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

L’Abri, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 04 to 13 Apr. 2013

Antidote 7, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 06 Oct. 2011 to 07 Jan. 2012

Utopie(s) from 04 May to 04 Jun. 2010

WARMDEWAR, Là où je suis n’existe pas, Printemps de septembre, Toulouse from 25 Sep. to 18 Oct. 2009

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

The French Connection: New Perspectives on French Contemporary Art across Disciplines, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge from 24 to 26 Jul. 2008

Des constructeurs éclectiques

CRAC - Centre régional d’art contemporain OCCITANIE, Sète from 18 Jan. to 13 Mar. 2008

The title Warmdewar refers to the dewar, a container used to preserve matter by cryogenizing it. The extension of this technology to living beings is the source of many science fiction scenarios and this short film is no exception. In this film shot in Iceland, we see a man waking up from cryonics and wandering through a deserted landscape where only disused buildings reveal the traces of a past civilization. In despair, he utters a cry that pierces the sound of the waves and the wind. Among the images embedded in the video, one can recognize the Ryugyong Tower in North Korea, left unfinished after the fall of the USSR until 2011. The artist appreciates this motif because it embodies the embedding of political utopias in the landscape. The aesthetics of these concrete carcasses emerging in the midst of the wilderness gives a contemplative dimension to this postapocalyptic vision.

Romane Grouille

Nicolas Moulin

Title Datchotel Ryugyong

Date 2007

Materials Fermacell

Dimensions 300 × 265 × 265 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Les Ruines du Futur, Château d’Oiron, Oiron from 27 Jun. to 03 Oct. 2010

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Les Mondes disparus – Une archéologie du futur Centre d’Art Bastille, Grenoble from 03 May to 29 Jun. 2008

Décentralisation…, Galerie Espace MICA, Rennes fom 16 Nov. 2007 to 26 Jan. 2008

LAC DATCH, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 26 May to 30 Jun. 2007

Datchotel Ryugyong is a reproduction of the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang (North Korea), a 330-metre-tall reinforced concrete building whose construction was never completed. It is a “white elephant”, a term used to describe these colossal projects that were never completed due to lack of funds or rationality. This piece is the first in a series devoted to futuristic architectural myths. With its enigmatic form, this monument appears like a paleolithic skeleton in a natural history museum.

Petra Mrzyk Jean-François Moriceau

Dates and places of birth: 1973, Nuremberg, Germany

Live

and work in Montjean-sur-Loire, France

Together, Petra Mrzyk and Jean-François Moriceau create dreamlike drawings that unfold in imaginary and psychedelic worlds midway between dream and reality. Their playful and exuberant strokes find their inspiration in today’s world: television icons, advertisements, science fiction images, the world of childhood. The two artists were quick to move beyond the sheet of paper and increasingly work on the scale of the mural or in animated film. They have created music videos for Air, Justice, and Sébastien Tellier.

Petra Mrzyk, born in 1973 in Nuremberg, and Jean-François Morceau, born in 1974 in Saint-Nazaire, have been working together since they met at the École des Beaux-arts de Quimper in 1999. They live and work in Montjean-sur-Loire.

Title Untitled

Date 2001

Materials Ink, paper

Dimensions 26 × 34 × 2.3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

1974,

Saint-Nazaire, France

Montjean-sur-Loire, France

The drawing Untitled (2001) has an anecdotal aspect due to its layout: it is not exactly centred on the sheet of paper which creates the impression that it was done spontaneously, as suggested by the borders of the cleverly interrupted elements. This is not the case, however, as this work is part of a production process set up in 1999, in which each person works separately and then creates “twists” by pooling their drawings and ideas. The duo Mrzyk and Moriceau do not want this process to make the hand that is at work identifiable. In a bedroom sparsely furnished with a bed and curtains in front of an opening, an intimate scene takes place before our eyes: three folders are interlocked in an unusual three-way. The evocation of an erotic fantasy has become a recurrent theme in the duo’s work and remains typical of their spirit, but is it really the expression of a fantasy when it is diverted through such a bizarre analogy?

Léonie Maton

Petra Mrzyk Jean-François Moriceau

Title Untitled Date 2004

Materials Ink, paper

Dimensions

34.5 × 46.5 × 2.5 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Title Untitled

Date 2005

Materials Ink, paper

Dimensions 34.5 × 46.5 × 2.5 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Untitled is a typical example of the strange yet endearing world that has become Petra Mrzyk and Jean-François Moriceau’s hallmark. An ink drawing on paper made jointly, it is composed of a line of characters whose attention seems to be focused to their right: a woman whose head and torso are hidden behind a huge spray of flowers, a cubic four-limbed creature topped by a head with a cat looking inside it, a family of dogs next to a man in a double-breasted suit who is checking his watch, a stage character in cowboy boots whose suitcase is powering the iron used on a dress. This series of strange images reveals a contemporary bestiary that draws on the imagination of childhood and the reflection of adulthood. The characters in Sans titre are not entirely detached from the obligations of the reality from which they seem to have escaped: a faceless woman with a dejected posture seems to be forced into having her dress ironed before being allowed to go on her way, while the two men wait impatiently. The family, traditional at first glance despite its cynocephaly, consists of two females, one of whom is hugging a baby, perhaps before offering it up to the curiosity of the cat. Finally, a second woman is rendered anonymous by the bouquet she is clutching or being smothering by. Petra Mrzyk and JeanFrançois Moriceau deliberately use black humour and an absence of colour to make the viewer concentrate on the unspoken aspects of Untitled

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

A man with sausages spilling out of his pockets and others as toes, a woman with an open skull from which two small figures emerge, a girl with a deformed face holding a boyish mushroom… These curious characters look on in bewilderment at what is happening on the buffet from which they were about to help themselves. A scene of debauchery unfolds on the table with the food itself: a strawberry charlotte is drinking champagne straight from the bottle, while a leggy sausage sends a right hook into a staggering plate of gougères under the eye of a pig’s head sporting piercings and dark glasses. The absurdity of the situation is not so much due to the anthropomorphization of the food as to the strange burlesque reversal that pushes the humans, themselves subtly hybridized, to contemplate this festive and comical scene. The duo’s joyfully shambolic works highlight our unspoken fantasies and the absurdity of certain everyday situations. They touch on social issues with an amused point of view, but also a form of black humour that is sometimes grating and cruel.

Marianne Tricoire

Petra Mrzyk Jean-François Moriceau

Title Untitled

Date 2005

Materials Ink, paper

Dimensions 25.5 × 34 × 2.5 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Petra Mrzyk and Jean-François Moriceau deploy their whimsical characters in strange and joyful pop universes always tinged with a latent anxiety. For once, no human presence is visible here: the drawing, sober and sparing, shows a long meeting desk around which ten chairs are installed. The large circular saw that emerges in the centre of the table brings together two professional worlds that generally have little in common: the world of the office, of the company and of management, and that of the factory, of manual labour, which here seems to threaten the tranquillity and comfort of the managers, whose presence is implied by that of the imposing seats. The duo’s joyfully shambolic works highlight our unspoken fantasies and the absurdity of certain everyday situations. They touch on social issues with an amused point of view, but also a form of black humour that is sometimes grating and cruel.

Marianne Tricoire

Ute Mueller

Date and place of birth: 1978, Graz, Austria

Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Ute Müller’s installations make use of the interaction between object and space to rethink the modalities of presentation and perception of the work of art. By integrating traditional exhibition media into her installations, the artist blurs the boundary between the work and its display device. Influenced by Brancusi, Müller initiates a reflection on the social dimension of the exhibition: by questioning the relationship between the work and its base, the artist rethinks the relationship between the object, the audience, and the space.

Born in 1978 in Graz, Ute Müller studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna then at the Royal College of Art in London. She lives and works in Vienna.

Ute Müller’s installation multiplies and combines various structures to give life to a collection of bases topped by abstract forms inherited from Brancusi’s studio. Through these ascending arrangements, the pedestal frees itself from its initial function as a base and in turn becomes a sculpture, a work in its own right. The minimal forms can be infinitely modified, swapping places and assembling themselves differently to provoke new reflections and interpretations. By integrating common exhibition media into her installation, the artist disrupts the observer and their preconceptions about the presentation, narration, and perception of the work of art. Müller thus proposes a renewed vision of the aesthetics and understanding of the installation as a genuine social space where the audience, the work, and its creator come together.

Quentin Rose

Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer

Rosalind Nashashibi

Date and place of birth: 1973, Croydon, United Kingdom

Lives and works in Liverpool, United Kingdom

Rosalind Nashashibi is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam University (Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting) and Glasgow School of Art (Master of Fine Arts). As a video artist, music plays an important part in her films. Her practice also includes photography, sculpture, and publishing through regular collaborations with the artist Lucy Skaer. Rosalind Nashashibi takes her observations of everyday life as a starting point for creating works in which reality meets mythology or fantasy. Through her work, the artist questions the internalised norms put in place by the State within society.

Lucy Skaer

Date and place of birth: 1975, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Lives and works in Glasgow, United Kingdom

Lucy Skaer trained at Glasgow School of Art (BA in Fine Arts, Honors). She is a member of the artist collective Henry VIII’s Wives. Lucy Skaer’s practice includes sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and video through regular collaborations with Rosalind Nashashibi. In her work, she highlights the tension between abstraction and the materiality of objects: they can take on the formal existence of objects replicated with everyday materials. They also challenge the public’s relationship with space by interacting with it. The symbols and images Lucy Skaer conjures up have political and social meanings.

Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer

Title Why Are You Angry?

Date 2017

Materials HD video

Dimensions 18 minutes

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions

Portrait of a lady, Fondation Boghossian – Villa Empain, Régis Decroos, Brussels from 09 Mar. to 27 Aug. 2022

You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020 Documenta 14, Athens from 08 Mar. to 16 Jul. 2017

Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have been making videos together since 2005. Why Are You Angry? takes its title from an 1896 painting by Paul Gauguin. Shot in Tahiti in 16mm format, the film questions how our view of Polynesian women was built on the phallocentric, as well as colonial, point of view of the painter, whose works are so iconic. The two artists filmed several women sometimes going about their daily business, sometimes playing a game of silent living tableaux. That is what makes this film an intermingling of gazes—our gaze on the women, and their gaze on us—which takes into account how difficult it is, still today, to observe and represent the Other without resorting to mythology and fantasy.

Shahryar Nashat

Date and place of birth: 1975, Tehran, Iran Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Shahryar Nashat developed an early interest in video, which today occupies an important place in his work. He combines this medium with sculpture, photography, and furniture to create works that play on the relationship between objects and visitors’ bodies. The latter are at the heart of his work, as he focuses on studying the magnetism that art objects can exert on the body. Nashat uses generic forms, such as cubes and polygons, questioning their place in the museum space while exploring the relationships between them and with visitors.

Born in 1975 in Tehran, Shahryar Nashat studied at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. He was awarded the Lafayette Prize in 2013. He lives and works in Berlin.

Title Lean Mean Posing Machine

Date 2012

Materials Marble

Dimensions 61 × 135 × 35 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Shahryar Nashat – Prix Lafayette 2013, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 20 Oct. to 23 Nov. 2014

Lean Mean Posing Machine is a geometric work in white marble representing a bench whose clean lines are only broken by the black marble armrest. Used in sculpture since ancient times, marble refers to a tradition and heritage in artistic practices. In the collective imagination, this material evokes sculptures dating from antiquity to the modern period. The tradition of marble is broken by the extremely sober aspect of the bench, which refers to minimalism. This form evokes both everyday and museum furniture. Lean Mean Posing Machine is intended to disturb, to cause the viewer to wonder whether or not they can sit on this bench, whether or not it is a work of art. Shahryar Nashat once again plays on this magnetism, on this attraction that art objects can exert on bodies. He questions the classification of contemporary art, which sometimes takes unclassifiable forms, as well as the limits that the artist may or may not cross.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Shahryar Nashat

Title Nashat’s New Fit for the Old Guard Nr.2

Date 2013

Materials Fibre-based paper

Dimensions 74 × 56 cm (work) 77 × 59 × 3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions The Cold Horizontals, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 29 Sep. 2017 to 06 Jan. 2018

Shahryar Nashat – Prix Lafayette 2013, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 20 Oct. to 23 Nov. 2014

Title Nashat’s New Fit for the Old Guard Nr.3

Date 2013

Materials Fibre-based paper

Dimensions 74 × 56 cm (work) 77 × 59 × 3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions The Cold Horizontals, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 29 Sep. 2017 to 06 Jan. 2018

Shahryar Nashat – Prix Lafayette 2013, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 20 Oct. to 23 Nov. 2014

In Shahryar Nashat’s New Fit for the Old Guard (2013), green rectangular shapes take over the artistic bodies captured in black-and-white photographic prints. In the photographs, these sculptures from antiquity are partially hidden by green rectangles. In the hands of Nashat, different artistic forms resonate to form a new work in which the human body plays the main role. The artist questions the modes of representation and codes used to show art objects in museums, a process that is expressed through a geometric hybridization passing through the forms added to the photographed works. Paradoxically, the green rectangles cover an important part of the work while suddenly highlighting other elements.

Julie Robin

Shahryar Nashat

Title Nashat’s New Fit for the Old Guard Nr.6

Date 2013

Materials Fibre-based paper

Dimensions 74 × 56 cm (work) 77 × 59 × 3 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions The Cold Horizontals, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 29 Sep. 2017 to 06 Jan. 2018

Shahryar Nashat – Prix Lafayette 2013, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 20 Oct. to 23 Nov. 2014

Title Prosthetic Everyday

Date 2013

Materials HD video

Dimensions 10 minutes 14 seconds

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Prosthetic Everyday, 356 Mission, Los Angeles from 19 Jun. to 02 Aug. 2015

Julie Robin

Prosthetic Everyday is a video that focuses on the movement of the human body, especially the knees. For ten minutes, it shows a man walking through a museum. The image is framed on his knees, one of which is covered by trousers, the other naked. This walk is interspersed with sequences showing the knees or the uncovered torso of the man still moving against a green background. As the video goes on, several things change. Firstly, the man changes his way of walking. Initially very fast, it becomes slower and more majestic. He even raises his knees to move like a bird. The rhythm of the music also accelerates. The works of art hanging on the walls also become more and more visible thanks to shots showing the paintings. However, the paintings remain blurred and difficult to identify. It is not so much the painting itself that counts, but the idea of the work. The last image shows the man taking a knee, in the same position as the figures depicted on the canvas in the background, which seems to transform him. In this video, the artist takes up one of his favourite themes: the study of the human body in the museum space.

Élise Vassiliadis-Poirey

Shahryar Nashat

Title Image is an Orphan

Date 2017

Materials HD video (colour, sound), LED screen

Dimensions 230 × 280 cm (1 LED screen option) 240 × 275 cm (2 screens option) 18 minutes 28 seconds (video)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

The Cold Horizontals, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 29 Sep. 2017 to 06 Jan. 2018

The works of Shahryar Nashat use sensuality and insolence to invite viewers to reflect upon the existing links between technology, the body, and images. His installations, in which video plays a key role, question the magnetism of art and challenge the equivalence between objects and bodies. In Image is an Orphan, the wall of LED screens offers its metal back to viewers, while the space the work occupies is marked out by pink light. A disembodied, generic and virtual voice repeats a series of difficult questions about death, while images—such as a bed or an empty chair—suggest bodies that have disappeared.

Audrey Nervi

Date and place of birth: 1974, Lyon, France

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Audrey Nervi’s work depicts today’s world as seen from its margins. Her working method is always the same: from photographs taken during her travels, she creates canvases with a hyper-realistic feel that portray communities living on the fringes of society. Through the pictorial language, she sets them up as symbols of causes which are meaningful to her. These take on meaning against the backdrop of night-time meetings or after-parties, through which the artist bears witness, with a particularly frank aesthetic, to the socio-political tensions linked to current events.

Born in 1974 in Lyon, Audrey Nervi graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Lyon (1999) and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris (2000). She lives and works in Berlin.

Title Barbapapa, Mexico

Date 2002

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 22 × 27 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Among the countless photographic souvenirs she brought back from her trip to Mexico, Audrey Nervi wanted to render on canvas a shared moment that she captured during a party. In an almost cinematographic scene, the artist has depicted a common “moment of life” with an aesthetic close to photoreportage. In the light of a makeshift streetlight, the ghostly silhouettes of several characters stand out against the darkness of the night. Painted from life, they bustle around two large pink cotton candies partially wrapped around wooden sticks. The cottony appearance of the confectionery in the centre merges with the blurred rendering and the soft texture of the canvas, giving them the appearance of an oddity, an indescribable, deformed mass. Through its pictorial staging, this scene takes on meaning against a background of political and social reality: in addition to evoking consumer society, it is undoubtedly the image of a world on the road to perdition that Audrey Nervi wanted to represent.

Elea Dargelos

Audrey Nervi

Title Je t’aime, Paris

Date 2004

Materials Oil paint on canvas

Dimensions 52 × 36.4 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Title The Cleaner, Paris

Date 2005

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 25 × 25 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

In this contemporary still life, Audrey Nervi paints a portrait of a trivial object she found in a Parisian street. The absence of a human figure focuses the eye on the appearance and colour of this form that sits majestically in the centre of the canvas. Probably deemed to be useless or out of fashion, what appears to be a discarded item acquires a new meaning through the artist’s pictorial work: the detail of the adhesive tape on which the inscription “I love you” appears in red capital letters highlights the importance of this object to which a new status has been conferred. Against the backdrop of our political and social reality, the seemingly trivial presence of this form takes on meaning and becomes evocative. Overcoming the divide between what deserves to be represented and what does not, the canvas bears witness to the rejection of those who live on the fringes of society but who find refuge in Audrey Nervi’s works.

Elea Dargelos

In this painting with hyper-realistic touches, Audrey Nervi documents an incongruous situation she observed during a rave. In the centre of the canvas, she has captured the posture of a blue-haired boy sitting on a white vacuum a few steps away from CRS riot police trucks. In the larger continuum that the work suggests, numerous silhouettes are outlined in the warm light of a car’s headlights. In contrast to the agitation of this mass of bodies at the edge of the canvas, this individual seems to have been captured unwittingly in this calm pose. Isolated, he has been designated by the artist—not without irony—as The Cleaner, no doubt because of his peaceful demeanour—the only way to end the chaos. Here, Audrey Nervi sets him up as a symbol, referring to an entire marginalised section of society which, in her painting, takes on an entirely different status.

Elea Dargelos

Audrey Nervi

Title Security, Pologne

Date 2005

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 36.3 × 55 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

All the Same, Stellan Holm Gallery, New York, 2005

Title Viviane, Italie

Date 2005

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 30.3 × 40.2 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Following a trip to Poland, Audrey Nervi transcribed onto canvas a photographic flash reflected in the eyes of a muzzled guard dog. In this scene, depicted from a low-angle photograph, the viewer is confronted with a vision that leers over them. The threatening air of the dog ready to attack to defend its mistress instils a form of unease, reflecting the tensions that reign in this country faced with a rise in authoritarian movements. In 2005, the year of Nervi’s trip to Poland, the conservative party made an electoral breakthrough and came out on top in the elections, which they went on to win. In reaction to a policy devoid of meaning, Audrey Nervi symbolised the rise of public distrust of outsiders and foreigners. The word “security” in the title of the work points to the trend towards the erosion in acceptance and tolerance of the other, accentuated by the far right’s rise to power.

Elea Dargelos

Here, Audrey Nervi endeavours to recreate a memory of her Italian sojourn by depicting a young girl named Viviane whom she met there. From a candid photograph taken during her travels, the artist meticulously transcribes the posture of the protagonist represented in the foreground, sitting on a sofa in the outdoors. The realism of the scene shows the young woman in the glow of a flash that seems to surprise and blind her. This artificial light also reveals the surrounding environment: a forest plunged into darkness that could refer to the fringes. Seemingly almost swallowed up by what lies beyond the frame, Viviane seems to be on the verge of “stepping offscreen”, reflecting her lifestyle on the margins of society.

Elea Dargelos

Audrey Nervi

Monya et Heidi, Italie

Date 2005

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 23 × 39 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

All the Same, Stellan Holm Gallery, New York, 2005

Title Damien, Pologne

Date 2005

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 25 × 18 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

In this painting, Audrey Nervi captures the memory of her encounter with two women during a trip to Italy in 2004. From the mass of images in her photographic diary, she selected this shot of Monya and Heidi floating on an inflatable mattress in the middle of a lake. Captured on the fly, their attitude has been transcribed in an almost voyeuristic perspective, as if they were photographed unawares. Audrey Nervi does not present us with a snapshot, but with a hyper-realistic painting: through a work of reproduction, she restores on the canvas the reality of the experience of the moment through the pictorial medium. The event is then emptied of all its futility and insignificance to become a piece of narrative, the beginning of a story. It becomes, ultimately, the expression of the artist’s attentive gaze on the contemporary world.

Elea Dargelos

After one of her many wanderings, Audrey Nervi painted from a photograph what appears to be a tombstone. Erected on the side of a Polish road near several trees, the tombstone is decorated with a bouquet of red and white roses left to honour the memory of a certain Damien, as suggested by the title and the total absence of a human figure. The gaze focuses on this trivial object, which seems temporary and hastily constructed, and which is put on display here for the eloquence of its message. A faint white glow emanates from the tombstone, the result of Audrey Nervi’s sharp brushwork imitating the light of a flash, which, on the canvas, takes on the new meaning of an existential reflection. In this modern memento mori, the artist distorts the norms of classical painting to evoke the pain caused by the loss of one of her friends, who we suspect was the victim of a car accident.

Elea Dargelos

Title

Audrey Nervi

Title Red Dead - Tchéquie

Date 2006

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 20 × 28 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Enlève ton masque, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris from 03 Feb. to 03 Mar. 2007

Title Enfermé dehors 1 & 2 - Thaïlande

Date 2006

Materials Oil on canvas

Dimensions 10 × 10 × 4 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Enlève ton masque, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris from 03 Feb. to 03 Mar. 2007

From her trip to the Czech Republic, Audrey Nervi brought back a snapshot of what appears to be a human body curled up on the ground, wrapped in a red and black sleeping bag. Washed up in the frame, the subject remains anonymous. After surreptitiously capturing it with her camera, the artist chose to represent it in paint to immortalize the moment of this chance encounter. Red Dead, the title of the work, reflects the artist’s first impression of this individual. The scene is striking in its strangeness: only a fragment of the protagonist’s body remains, enough to convey their state of fatigue. In the margins, the plastic cups are clues to the story the artist wants to tell: the scene seems to refer to the aftermath of a rave or a festive gathering, events in which she regularly participates.

Elea

Dargelos

From her travels in Thailand, Audrey Nervi retained the image of a young man walking on a beach with rubber rings on his shoulders. On her return, she chose to paint this moment for its evocative power. The reportage quality of the scene refers directly to current events. The inflatable objects in the centre of the canvas can refer to ecological and social considerations: rising water levels and the environment on the one hand, wandering and the margins of society on the other. The title, Enfermé dehors (Locked outside), refers both to the blindness of the media and to their refusal to communicate on compromising or taboo subjects which they suppress in the realm of the unspeakable, the unspoken. The anonymous protagonist depicted from behind becomes a symbol: he allows the painter to initiate a pictorial dialogue with the contemporary world by embodying her hopes for change and her desire for alter-globalization.

Elea Dargelos

Anne Neukamp

Date and place of birth: 1976, Düsseldorf, Germany

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

After figurative works, Anne Neukamp quickly turned towards abstraction. She is currently interested in consumer society and draws her inspiration from logos, diagrams, and typography drawn from the communications industry to create works that are in keeping with pop reductionism. She studies them as symbols, examining the notions of transmission and understanding of cognitive systems, in canvases with a pictorial surface that is always perfectly worked, with no material effects and no play on colour or perspective.

Born in 1976 in Düsseldorf, Anne Neukamp is a graduate of the Dresden University of Fine Arts and was a resident of the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2015. She currently lives in Berlin.

This silhouette of a palm tree appears to have been cut out of an old photograph and inserted into a frame in an aesthetic imbued with melancholy and a fascination for these images with the appearance of postcard details. As in other works depicting landscape elements, here Anne Neukamp is interested in the geometry of the shapes, which, through either superimposition or separation, blur the palm tree’s original appearance. Similarly, the dechromatisation at work here gives the canvas an atonal dimension and blurs the motif through pastel colours that seem emptied of their substance. These dull tones are characteristic of the artist's early career, shortly before her transition from figuration to abstraction, and, like Piet Mondrian, the quest for the “ultimate form”.

Chiara Perez

Valentin Noujaïm

Date and place of birth: 1991, Angers, France

Lives and works in Angers, France

Title Pacific Club

Date 2022

Materials HD video

Dimensions 16 minutes 37 secondes

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions

Berenice Olmedo

Date and place of birth: 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico

Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico

Berenice Olmedo uses debris as raw material for her sculptures. Largely inspired by the portrayal of marginalized groups, her work unfolds around two axes: the transformation of the remains of stray dogs into everyday products (clothes, soap…) and the recovery of discarded prosthetics. This second creative process expresses the artist’s interest in the dependence of human beings from birth. She seeks to provoke a reflection on the things that elevate or diminish so as to encourage us to question our relationship with the elements of everyday life. Between dependence and oppression, the prosthesis is positioned as both a supportive metal skeleton and a temporary straitjacket for a more independent adult life.

Born in 1987 in Oaxaca, Berenice Olmedo studied at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. She lives and works in Mexico City.

Title Penelope

Date 2020

Materials Polypropylene, aluminium, velcro, mechatronics, microcontrollers

Dimensions 74 × 30 × 18 cm

Acquisition date 2020

Exhibitions Antéfutur, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux from 06 Apr. to 03 Sep. 2023

And suddenly it all blossoms, Port Building, 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Riga from 20 Aug. to 13 Sep. 2020

This sculpture consists of electronic and mechanical elements that materialize lower limbs. The knees seem to be bent in a position of momentum or submission. The reuse of orthopaedic prostheses makes Penelope into the “little sister” of Olga, a sculpture created in 2018. The common model of a metal frame in the shape of a human body stems from the denunciation of air and water pollution. The artist acquired the components for these works at a flea market in Iztapalapa, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Mexico City. The heavy environmental pollution there leads to the appearance of deformities in children, and therefore to an abundance of prostheses. Close attention to the recovered prosthesis reveals that it belonged to a child who decorated it with cartoon characters during his recovery. That child’s name was Penelope. Berenice Olmedo honours each healed child by naming the piece after the former child owner, like an exvoto. The sculpture can also perform movements to make it stand up and walk. However, this is a choreography that is repeatedly performed in vain, with Penelope inevitably falling back onto her knees.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

Berenice Olmedo

Title Hic et Nunc (Irma, Patricia)

Date 2022

Materials Trial socks for femoral prostheses, liners (silicone sleeves for prostheses), robotic system, microcontrollers, servomotors

Dimensions 135 × 40 × 40 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Hic et Nunc, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 10 Jun. to 18 Sep. 2022

Title Hic et Nunc (Joaquín, Rafael)

Date 2022

Materials Trial socks for femoral prostheses, liners (silicone sleeves for prostheses), robotic system, microcontrollers, servomotors

Dimensions 135 × 40 × 40 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Hic et Nunc, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 10 Jun. to 18 Sep. 2022

By salvaging prosthetic lower limbs from rubbish dumps or flea markets in Iztapalapa, a poor district of Mexico City, and creating replicas through a process of documentation in a specialist clinic, Berenice Olmedo highlights the heavy environmental pollution that causes deformities in children that require amputations. By transcending the serial nature of these mass-produced objects, from which she creates several similar works, the artist shows marginalised and invisible social groups—as suggested by the transparency of these objects which have been elevated to the status of works of art—from a personal perspective, notably by the addition of first names. By giving her work the title of a famous Epicurean and Stoic Latin maxim, she also encourages those that wear prosthetics to go beyond the ableism of today’s society and to live fully according to their wishes.

Chiara Perez

Berenice Olmedo

Title Hic et Nunc (Silvia, Camila)

Date 2022

Materials Trial socks for femoral prostheses, liners (silicone sleeves for prostheses), robotic system, microcontrollers, servomotors

Dimensions 135 × 40 × 40 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Hic et Nunc, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 10 Jun. to 18 Sep. 2022

Chiara Perez

Lydia Ourahmane

Date and place of birth: 1992, Saïda, Algeria

Lives and works between Alger, Algeria and Barcelona, Spain

Lydia Ourahmane’s work is imbued with the events of her own life and that of her relatives, marked by emigration. Her works explore the relationship between history and the present, whether through their intimate or political aspects. The artist allows her projects to mature for long periods of time, most of the time without setting specific expectations, before collecting the results.

Born in 1992 in Saïda, Lydia Ourahmane graduated from Goldsmiths College in London in 2014. She lives and works between Alger and Barcelona.

Title low relief

Date 2019

Materials Thermometer, wax, brass

Dimensions 33 × 27 × 18 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions low relief, Bodega Gallery, New York from 27 Apr. to 16 Jun. 2019

Lydia Ourahmane collects the materials needed to create her works in Algeria, then works on them in London. This process allows her to maintain a certain distance that she deems necessary to deal with her chosen subjects. The work low relief (2019) consists of a red wax cube whose centre is marked by the imprint of a stone from Mount Vesuvius. This cube is accompanied by a thermometer, the temperature of which varies according to the temperature of the exhibition space. Like many of Ourahmane’s works, low relief has a history whose traces are contained in the materials used. The sculpture evokes the emergence of bodies, an idea which took on its full meaning in the eponymous exhibition at the Bodega gallery in New York in 2019: low relief was exhibited there among sculpted human body parts that seemed to emerge from the ground.

Julie Robin

Christelle Oyiri

Date

and place of birth: 1992, Nogent-sur-Marne,

France

Lives and works in Paris, France

DJ, music producer, writer and artist Christelle Oyiri creates performances and sculptures as well as films and music. Firmly rooted in post-colonial issues, her work focuses on highlighting marginal narratives outside the dominant canon, in order to overcome colonial alienation. The artist’s desire to make these movements and issues linked to collective memory part of her heritage was embodied in the performance Collective Amnesia in 2018.

Born in 1992 in Nogent-sur-Marne, Christelle Oyiri is an artist of Guadeloupean and Ivorian origin. She is works as a music producer under the name Crystallmess.

This series of laser engravings on backlit household mirrors depicting masks from the Kru ethnic group (Ivory Coast/ Liberia) was shown at Gentle Battle, a solo exhibition by Christelle Oyiri that explores the issue of war in the political context of the Ivory Coast. In Vindicta, the artist becomes the archivist of an individual and collective memory through these ghostly masks which sometimes presenting ancestors as benevolent phantoms. However, this attitude does not exclude resentment, particularly the spirit of revenge suggested by the title, with a critique of the pillaging of colonisation. African masks, the victims of a simplistic caricatural vision by twentieth-century artists such as Pablo Picasso, may also be seen as reflecting the current controversy over the restitution of works of art.

Chiara Perez

Title Vindicta

Christelle Oyiri

Title Vindicta 002

Date 2022

Materials LED light box, mirror

Dimensions 99 × 63.5 × 12.5 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Gentle Battle, Tramway, Glasgow from 30 Apr. to 14 Aug. 2022

Title Vindicta 003

Date 2022

Materials LED light box, mirror

Dimensions 96 × 60 × 11 cm

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Gentle Battle, Tramway, Glasgow from 30 Apr. to 14 Aug. 2022

Chiara Perez

Christodoulos Panayiotou

Date and place of birth: 1978, Limassol, Cyprus

Lives and works between Limassol, Cyprus and Paris, France

Christodoulos Panayiotou practices his art as an anthropologist: in his multifaceted work, he uses research methods as well as choreographic approaches. He examines the way in which cultural and national identities have been constructed in relation to collective myths, thus embracing historiographical and sociological themes. His thoughts on contemporary society and its relationship with the past and with history are often based on his native country, Cyprus.

Born in 1978 in Limassol, Christodoulos Panayiotou studied performing arts (with a major in dance) at the Université Lumière-Lyon 2 and at the University of Surrey in Roehampton-London. In 2015, he was chosen to represent Cyprus at the 56th Venice Biennale. He lives and works between Limassol and Paris.

Title Untitled

Date 2015

Materials Shoes, cardboard shoeboxes, faux leather

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Christodoulos Panayiotou Act II: The Island Camden Arts Centre, Camden (London) from 27 Sep. 2019 to 05 Jan. 2020

Two Days after Forever, Cypriot pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, Venice from 09 May to 22 Nov. 2015

Untitled (2015) is an installation consisting of eight pairs of shoes in the artist’s size that have been cut from different shades and types of leather. Produced and exhibited on the occasion of the exhibition Two Days after Forever at the Cyprus Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale, this wardrobe of shoes is endowed with sentimentality. Perched on immaculate pedestals whose placement has been skilfully choreographed by the artist, these shoes have never set foot on the ground. They have no other function than to compose and reinvent the bond between the artist and the women in his family. The artist asked the women for one of their handbags, and then entrusted them to a craftsman who shaped them to his feet. A gift from one generation to the next, passing from hand to foot, from woman to man, this work illustrates the artist’s search for the right way to write history, to enhance its heritage and memorial qualities.

Gyan Panchal

Date and place of birth: 1973, Paris, France

Lives and works between Paris and Faux-la-Montagne, France

Gyan Panchal’s works make use of raw materials that are generally invisible which he transforms into artworks. By presenting these everyday elements altered by mechanical actions or by the application of industrial products, the artist turns these artefacts into links between man and his land, between man and nature. He refers to them as “hyphens”.

Born in 1973 in Paris, Gyan Panchal has a master’s in fine art from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and has had several solo exhibitions. He lives and works between Faux-la-Montagne and Paris.

Title uoel

Date 2006–8

Materials Polystyrene, petroleum

Dimensions 60 × 120 × 250 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Gyan Panchal : au seuil de soi, MAMC+ Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, Saint-Priest-en-Jarez from 20 Mar. to 22 Sep. 2019

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Les Elixirs de Panacée. Quand les artistes contemporains interrogent les secrets de l’alchimie, Palais Bénédictine, Fécamp from 13 May to 17 Oct. 2010

Ce qui demeure est le futur. Collection moderne et contemporaine du Musée de Picardie, Musée de Picardie, Amiens from 20 Feb. to 03 May 2009

Gyan Panchal recovers his materials in the manner of Arte Povera artists, using factories, building sites, and nature as his main sources. The materials he collects then undergo a form of recycling in which the artist subjects the object to a randomized process in order to make a work of art. For uoel (2006–8), Panchal used a block of unprocessed expanded polystyrene, a plastic material that he then coated with unrefined oil to obtain a perpetually humid surface. The work thus confronts the public with this fossil fuel, which is usually invisible as it is contained underground. The oil reveals patterns on the mass of polystyrene, encouraging the visitor to observe this element usually used as insulation in buildings, and therefore hidden.

Julie Robin

La Consistance du visible. Prix Ricard 2008, Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris from 10 Oct. to 22 Nov. 2008

Suites baroques – Biennale art grandeur nature Maison Populaire, Montreuil from 16 Sep. to 19 Nov. 2006

Uoel – festival Urbaines, Espace Bellevaux, Lausanne from 04 to 07 Dec. 2007

Gyan Panchal

Title Baubajai

Date 2012

Materials Foam board, sanguine powder

Dimensions 300 × 70 × 120 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Ce lien qui nous sépare, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris from 08 Sep. to 13 Oct. 2012

Gyan Panchal recovers his materials in the manner of Arte Povera artists, using factories, building sites, and nature as his main sources. The materials he collects then undergo a form of recycling in which the artist subjects the object to a randomized process in order to make a work of art. For Baubajai (2012), Gyan Panchal covered a foam board, a construction and insulation material, with hematite powder which gives it an orange appearance. The board, which is shaped by breaks and folds to create linear patterns, becomes a monumental abstract sculpture consisting of a sloping plane resting on a block that is itself leaning against the wall of the exhibition space. By presenting a work that connects the floor and wall, the artist frees himself from verticality and sculpture’s plinth.

Julie Robin

Anna Bella Papp

Date and place of birth: 1988, Chișineu-Criș, Romania

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Anna Bella Papp works in clay, an ancient material that evokes craftsmanship. She models it in the form of bas-reliefs in an easel painting format, blurring the line between painting and sculpture. She began her career with abstract, often geometric works that echo the modernist aesthetic in painting and reinterpret it through the depth of relief. Figuration entered her work in 2013 on the occasion of the Offspring 2013 exhibition at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Born in 1988 in Chișineu-Criș, Anna Bella Papp studied in Romania before moving to Amsterdam, where she now lives and works.

Title Untitled

Date 2016

Materials Clay

Dimensions 35.5 × 33.5 × 5 cm

Acquisition date 2018

Exhibitions

Anna Bella Papp has worked with clay to create a very flat rectangular work in the manner of an easel painting, an analogy reinforced by the small format. Untitled (2016) is a tightly framed portrait of a man that stands out from the background with a slight relief. The work’s clean, realistic style refers to the Italian artist Desiderio da Settignano, whose soft, idealised portraits immortalised Renaissance notables in white marble. The artist was also inspired by socialist realism, an artistic doctrine followed in the countries of the USSR, to which Romania belonged. The character is a communist proletarian figure. In her daily life in the Netherlands, Anna Bella Papp often meets Romanian immigrants working as labourers. She depicts them face on, in a noble and proud attitude, to draw our attention to the living conditions of Eastern European immigrants.

Justine

Grethen

Anna Parkina

Date and place of birth: 1979, Moscow, Russia

Lives and works in Moscow, Russia

Anna Parkina’s work is part of the new Russian art scene which, since the 1990s, has turned away from ideology to depict the uncertainties and uneasiness of post-communist Russia. The artist uses collage in a form of reference to Russian constructivism and the works of Raoul Hausmann or Max Ernst while integrating contemporary media images and abstract forms to evoke the past and present of her native country.

Born in 1979 in Moscow, Anna Parkina trained at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris (France) and at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Pasadena, California (USA). She lives and works in Moscow.

Title Frost on Deserted Weapon

Date 2011

Materials Paper

Dimensions 50 × 59.8 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Anna Parkina, The Arts Club, London from 26 Jun. to 29 Sep. 2013

The composition of this large collage is structured by the curve of the arm, repeated four times in a mirror image, of the man holding a scythe, probably a reference to the sickle which, together with the image of the hammer in the Soviet Union, symbolised the union of the agricultural workers and the proletariat. The sign is muddied here, as if the repetitions of the motif, always more or less symmetrical, created interference in the final meaning of the composition: the apparent familiarity of the images is disrupted by the complexity of the whole, as well as the addition of abstract elements, coloured fields, and arbitrary signs created by the cutting of the paper. The title of the work seems to denote a form of nostalgia and the idea of time inevitably passing by on the weapons of the past condemned to abandonment. Anna Parkina always seeks to blur the lines and create images that draw on a multitude of references—advertising, propaganda images, and Russian constructivism are among her inspirations—while remaining visual enigmas that reject any form of ideology.

Marianne Tricoire

Anna Parkina

Title Interrupted Confession

Date 2013

Materials Paper, laser prints

Dimensions 97.4 × 67.8 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Anna Parkina, Wilkinson Gallery, London from 15 Feb. to 28 Mar. 2013

Made from several photographs, this large collage blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, between plants, humans, and technology. Several images are combined and superimposed: a female figure with a hollowed-out face holding a green plant, a radiator, a window, snow-covered tree branches, and kitchen utensils. Together they form an enigmatic ensemble which, as the title suggests, invokes the idea of a secret, a confession whose meaning must be elucidated by adding visual signs. Anna Parkina’s images function like puzzles. While evoking Russian constructivism and Soviet propaganda, her collages create a layered and equivocal surface that recalls the unreal constructions and impossible perspectives of the Dutch draughtsman M.C. Escher, who was greatly inspired by architecture and mathematics, as well as the trompe l’oeil work of René Magritte.

Marianne Tricoire

Jean-Marie Perdrix

Date and place of birth: 1966, Bourg-en-Bresse, France

Lives and works between Paris, France and Burkina Faso

Jean-Marie Perdrix’s sculptural practice is inseparable from the conditions of its production. Using a variety of materials, from bronze to cast iron, the artist develops a pragmatic approach that draws on the constraints of the materials as well as the working conditions of the art professionals who work with him. For him, “the work comes together with the action with all the dimensions imposed by reality”. His work is thus a repository of the social, economic, and political conditions in which he develops his pieces.

Born in 1966 in Bourg-en-Bresse, Jean-Marie Perdrix studied at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg and at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. He lives and works between Paris and Burkina Faso.

Title Deux poids, deux mesures

Date 2015

Materials Melted plastic waste, goat hair

Dimensions 33 × 44 × 37 cm and 30 × 40 × 40 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions POP UP Truck, Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 04 Jun. 2016

Deux poids, deux mesures (2015) is a work inspired by the pre-industrial production processes of Burkina Faso’s bronze workers. Two composite elements made of melted plastic inlaid with goat hair are placed on the floor. They tell the story of the longstanding collaboration between the artist and a family of bronze craftsmen who, to avoid the high cost of lost wax, used one of the most common materials: the plastic waste that litters the streets and natural environments. JeanMarie Perdrix, who trained with these craftsmen and continues to produce with them, goes even further in the revaluation of this substance by making it the very material of his work. In his exploration of the relationship between the mineral and the living, he has taken goat skins destined for djembe, turned them inside out and shaped them into bags, transformed for the occasion into moulds for melted plastic. By seeking to “explore very different social, political, economic, and cultural situations” through his work, Jean-Marie Perdrix has developed a sculptural practice that he defines as pragmatic, conditioned by the materials and the context of production specific to each space and time.

Diego Perrone

Date and place of birth: 1970, Asti, Italy

Lives and works between Asti and Milan, Italy

Diego Perrone’s practice includes video art, photography, and sculpture. Between 2005 and 2008, he produced a series of largescale sculptures reflecting his taste for technical experimentation and the discovery of new materials. His works often reflect on the relationship between full and empty spaces, whether through the motif of the hole or the ear. His artistic universe is inhabited by the Italian avant-garde movements such as Arte Povera, futurism, or the Transavantgarde, which he often quotes in his work.

Born in 1970 in Asti (Italy), Diego Perrone now lives and works between Asti and Milan.

Title Due orecchie di corno con le loro ombre

Date 2008

Materials Mixed media

Dimensions 100 × 100 × 250 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Samedi-Samedi, Galerie Art:Concept, Paris from 13 Sep. to 08 Nov. 2008

Due orecchie di corno con le loro ombre is a sculpture consisting of two ears that surmount two large metal forms representing their oversized shadow. The ears are made of horn, which gives them a pearly appearance and allows for a play of transparency. This motif is recurrent in Diego Perrone’s as it allows him to pursue his reflections on the fullness and emptiness present in the very particular and complex architecture of the auricle. This subject also allows him to explore the material and its potentialities. Most of his ears are presented autonomously and independently of any reference to the human body. Moreover, these representations implicitly evoke mutilation and violence, themes that he likes to explore in his video production, such as in the film Angela e Alfonso (2002) where a man tries to cut off his girlfriend’s ear for love.

Romane Grouille

Mary Ping

Date and place of birth: 1978, New York, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

The Slow and Steady Wins the Race conceptual clothing line developed by Mary Ping, is a perpetual investigation into that which envelops us, the how and why of our clothes. Each collection also contains a commentary on the cultural anthropology of fashion today, focusing on the fundamental characteristics of design within a wardrobe. This work aims to reduce fashion to its most essential and empirical elements. Slow and Steady Wins the Race is an off-season line that demonstrates that design that succeeds in combining art and commerce elicits a response that is both intellectual and emotional, ageless, multicultural, sustainable, and limitless.

Born in 1978 in New York, Mary Ping studied art at Vassar College in New York before turning to design. She created her eponymous collection in 2001 and launched the Slow and Steady Wins the Race conceptual line in 2002. Mary Ping is a recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award for Fashion (2017), the Ecco Domani Award, and the UPS Future of Fashion award. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, RISD Museum, and the Deste Foundation. It was also featured in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s New York Fashion Show Now. Mary Ping lives and works in New York.

Title Metamorphosis

Date 2016

Materials Leather, stitching thread

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Items: Is Fashion Modern?, MOMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

from 01 Oct. 2017 to 28 Jan. 2018

Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

The Metamorphosis project from the Slow and Steady Wins the Race line, is about thinking of the handbag as an everyday object that has become primarily a social symbol and a fascinating cultural phenomenon within the contemporary anthropology of fashion. Initially, the bag had a utilitarian function: it was transportable and reliable. Today, bag design has evolved rapidly as a result of evolving trends and marketing, affected by the transition from artisanal practice to industrialised production. Throughout the Faisons de l’inconnu un allié exhibition, in collaboration with Made in Town and Monteneri’s finest artisans, Slow and Steady Wins the Race produced and presented live each day the production sequence of a leather handbag on a worktable designed in collaboration with Bureau V, leading to the production of ten handbags. This choreography of making emphasises the importance of knowledge, craft, and technique while criticising the dilution of creativity caused by the commercial industry. The profound metamorphosis of the now hybridised bags becomes strange, sculptural, and allegorical.

Work produced by Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette for the exhibition Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, 13-20 October 2016

Steven Pippin

Date and place of birth: 1960, Redhill, United Kingdom

Lives and works between London, United Kingdom and Berlin, Germany

Steven Pippin creates his own darkrooms out of unusual objects—a bathtub, a washing machine, a wardrobe. Since he places equal importance on developing these devices and on the photographic results, he is as much a sculptor as a photographer. His experimental photographic structures are based on physical and astronomical models that fascinate him. His Point Blank series concentrates many questions about the contemporary profusion of images: by creating photographic images that bear witness to the destruction of the camera, he highlights the risk of iconographic implosion that we find ourselves on the verge of.

Born in 1960 in Redhill, Steven Pippin studied mechanical engineering before studying fine art at Loughborough College and sculpture at Brighton Polytechnic and Chelsea School of Art. He lives and works between London and Berlin.

Title Deepfield

Date 2010

Materials Colour photograph on aluminium

Dimensions 91 × 73 × 5 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Café Mātēr exhibition, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 20 Jun. 2022 to 31 Dec. 2023

Steven Pippin : aberration optique, Centre Pompidou, Paris from 14 Jun. to 11 Sep. 2017

Steven Pippin’s 3D Breach of 2 Dimensional space (In Camera), Deepfield, and Reverse logic (In Camera) are a form of artistic hara-kiri. In the photographic series Point Blank, he reveals the swan song of his shooting devices: the images are made at the very moment of the camera’s destruction by gunshot. Deepfield (2010) is his first attempt to shoot a bullet directly into the centre of the lens. In keeping with his work from the 1990s, Steven Pippin creates works whose result is not the fruit of a pre-established aesthetic construction, but the image of an image-making device. The elementary photographic technologies which he creates himself give his pictures the air of early snapshots, but there is nothing melancholic about his approach. Rather, it points to the proliferation of images and their means of production, as well as to the iconographic implosion that awaits us.

Steven Pippin

Title 3D Breach of 2 Dimensional space (In Camera)

Date 2010

Materials Colour photograph on aluminium

Dimensions 66 × 76 × 5 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Café Mātēr exhibition, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 20 Jun. 2022 to 31 Dec. 2023

Steven Pippin : aberration optique, Centre Pompidou, Paris from 14 Jun. to 11 Sep. 2017

Title Reverse logic (In Camera)

Date 2014

Materials Colour photograph on aluminium

Dimensions 76 × 66 × 5 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Café Mātēr exhibition, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 20 Jun. 2022 to 31 Dec. 2023

Steven Pippin : aberration optique, Centre Pompidou, Paris from 14 Jun. to 11 Sep. 2017

This work represents the second stage of the artist’s experiment. The bullet, fired from behind the camera, passes through the field of view before being photographed. Steven Pippin’s works 3D Breach of 2 Dimensional space (In Camera), Deepfield, and Reverse logic (In Camera) are a form of artistic hara-kiri. In the photographic series Point Blank, he reveals the swan song of his shooting devices: the images are made at the very moment of the camera’s destruction by gunshot. Deepfield (2010) is his first attempt to shoot a bullet directly into the centre of the lens. In keeping with his work from the 1990s, Steven Pippin creates works whose result is not the fruit of a pre-established aesthetic construction, but the image of an image-making device. The elementary photographic technologies which he creates himself give his pictures the air of early snapshots, but there is nothing melancholic about his approach. Rather, it points to the proliferation of images and their means of production, as well as to the iconographic implosion that awaits us.

This work is the final stage of the artist’s experiment. Here, the weapon is placed inside the camera. With the help of a device consisting of two mirrors, the image is captured just as the bullet passes through the camera’s lens. The camera’s reflection can be made out on the left-hand side of the work. Steven Pippin’s 3D Breach of 2 Dimensional space (In Camera), Deepfield, and Reverse logic (In Camera) are a form of artistic hara-kiri. In the photographic series Point Blank, he reveals the swan song of his shooting devices: the images are made at the very moment of the camera’s destruction by gunshot. Deepfield (2010) is his first attempt to shoot a bullet directly into the centre of the lens. In keeping with his work from the 1990s, Steven Pippin creates works whose result is not the fruit of a pre-established aesthetic construction, but the image of an image-making device. The elementary photographic technologies which he creates himself give his pictures the air of early snapshots, but there is nothing melancholic about his approach. Rather, it points to the proliferation of images and their means of production, as well as to the iconographic implosion that awaits us.

Reto Pulfer

Date and place of birth: 1981, Bern, Switzerland

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Reto Pulfer is a self-taught artist who expresses himself through painting, drawing, writing, music, found objects, and everyday materials such as textiles, foodstuffs, and herbs. He manipulates them with simple, DIY-like techniques and processes. In this way, he creates environments that are both intuitive and complex, total works of art to be experienced and perceived synesthetically.

Title Die Treffen des Platzes

Date 2012–13

Materials Cotton, ink, sheets

Dimensions 285 × 900 × 850 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

100 Jahre Gegenwart. Der Auftakt, HKW - Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin from 29 Sep. to 04 Oct. 2015

Dehydrierte Landschaft, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva, from 28 May to 20 Aug. 2015

Die Treffen des Platzes, sic! Raum für Kunst, Elephanthouse, Lucerne, from 18 Jan. to 22 Feb. 2014

A self-taught artist, Reto Pulfer uses painting, writing, drawing, music, and a smattering of salvaged objects to build intuitive and enveloping installations that explore notions of language, botany, landscape, and nomadism. The installation Die Treffen des Platzes (“The Encounters of Place”) was conceived by the artist while he was writing a science-fiction novel, Die Exzentriker (“The Excentrics”). Demarcated by a tent, the perimeter of the installation evokes a public underground space, such as those found in shopping centres in North America—labyrinthine and autonomous root-like spaces. Like a grotto, the work produces its own thermic and hygrometric variation, and invites visitors into an “oblique voyage”, as the artist calls it, that lends itself to meeting and exchange.

Géraldine Py Roberto Verde

Dates and places of birth: 1986, Belfort, France

1981,

Jesi, Italy

Live and work in Brussels, Belgium Brussels, Belgium

The artistic duo Géraldine Py and Roberto Verde explore the empirical phenomena that govern our daily lives through a multifaceted practice that includes films, installations, sculptures, and performances. They use real scientific experiments to stage the mechanisms of the living world and the inert world of objects in situations and installations that border on the absurd. Tinged with humour and derision, the stories they tell draw attention to curiosities and embody a new perception of everyday life.

Géraldine Py, born in 1986 in Belfort, and Roberto Verde, born in 1981 in Jesi, met at the École des Beaux-arts de Marseille and have been working together since 2008. They have exhibited their work throughout Europe and their videos and performances have been screened and staged at the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, and the FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais. They live and work in Brussels.

Le train de nuit follows parcels travelling on a conveyor belt in the Bussy-Saint-Georges warehouse of Galeries Lafayette. At the invitation of the Foundation, the artistic duo Géraldine Py and Roberto Verde decided to focus on the circulation of goods within this space and to imagine its nocturnal life. They take us on an excursion into a ghost train setting with the help of cameras and lamps placed inside the parcels. These views alternate with long shots that capture the trajectory of the goods from a distance. The different points of view adopted by the artists make each package unique, revealing the dramatic and poetic potential of their nocturnal procession. The almost scientific observation of the mechanisms governing them elevates them from banality and presents them as curiosities capable of creating surprise.

Suzana Danilovic

Chloé Quenum

Date and place of birth: 1983, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Both complex and restrained, Chloé Quenum’s first installations make use of everyday objects and images in a different way each time. These variations allow her to explore the modalities of representation and their mutations in the manner of an infinite work in progress. Through this installation performance, the artist questions the displacement and impermanence of things. Inspired by her stays in West Africa and Oceania, her approach is now evolving towards an anthropological and historical approach to methods of transmission and communication through writing.

Born in 1983 in Paris, Chloé Quenum graduated with honours from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in 2011. She is represented by the Galerie Joseph Tang (Paris). She lives and works in Paris.

Title Figures, Speech and commotion #1 Date 2014

This painting-object presenting a jacket inside a frame is extended in three dimensions by the presence of hands and a loudspeaker whose arrangement Chloé Quenum adjusts according to the exhibition context. The arrangement and assembly of the objects evolve in order to explore the spatial possibilities of the installation. Here, the selected presentation takes on an anthropomorphic aspect: the hands and the loudspeaker refer to touch and hearing, while the garment symbolizes the bust. Ironically, the cold minimalism of the artificial frame is transformed into a human, carnal warmth, while the work implicitly expands in the space to better appropriate it. Through the humanized staging of objects, Chloé Quenum formulates the different stages of a statement on the movement inherent in the installation and the effects it produces, as the title of the work suggests: Figures, Speech and commotion #1

Quentin Rose

Michael Rakowitz

Date and place of birth: 1973, New York, United States Lives and works in Chicago, United States

Michael Rakowitz is interested in the tensions between the United States and Iraq, and to a greater extent those between the West and the Middle East. Since the 2000s, his artistic practice has been permeated by issues related to notions of heritage, memory, and transmission. He reinterprets in a protean way heritage buildings that have sometimes been rendered inaccessible by geopolitical circumstances to bear witness to narratives that are not legitimized by history. His work deals with power relationships, their stakes, and their consequences on different scales, whether international, national, or local.

Born in 1973 in New York to Iraqi parents, Michael Rakowitz now lives and works in Chicago.

Title The invisible enemy should not exist

Date 2016

Materials Papier-mâché made from newspapers and packaging from the Middle East, glue, museum labels

Dimensions 140 × 60 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Michael Rakowitz, FRAC Lorraine, Metz from 22 Feb. to 12 Jun. 2022 Bagdad, mon amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris from 29 Mar. to 05 Aug. 2018

Begun in 2006 in response to the looting of the National Museum of Baghdad in 2003, the series The invisible enemy should not exist reinterprets archaeological objects that were kept in the collections of this institution. Michael Rakowitz reproduces these “ghost artefacts” to scale based on the database created by the University of Chicago and on the worldwide list of stolen works compiled by Interpol. The works are not identical to the originals, however: they are simulacra that the artist wraps in food packaging and newspapers from the Arab world to reflect the economic stakes underlying international political relations. For him, it is a matter of “making visible objects that are culturally invisible,” notably through the pejorative perception of Iraqi culture within American society, by embodying the gaps that these destructions create and that this series contributes to filling.

Léonie Maton

Michael Rakowitz

Title Stela fragment; relief carving shows two men wearing skirt and head band and four animals (lions) (IM23477) (Recovered, Missing, Stolen series)

Date 2016

Materials Packaging and newspapers from the Middle East, glue

Dimensions 104 × 70 × 52 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions Michael Rakowitz, FRAC Lorraine, Metz from 22 Feb. to 12 Jun. 2022 Bagdad, mon amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris from 29 Mar. to 05 Aug. 2018

Léonie Maton

Sinziana Ravini

Date and place of birth: 1976, Bucharest, Romania

Lives and works in Paris, France

As a psychoanalyst, journalist (for Aftonbladet, Artpress, Technikart, etc.), magazine editor (Paletten), writer, and curator, Sinziana Ravini has conceived several “exhibition-novels,” including The Hidden Mother and The Chessroom (Atelier Rouart, 2012 and 2013), as well as the “exhibition-film” Black Moon (Palais de Tokyo, 2013), which blurred the boundaries between the visual arts, literature, and cinema. Each of them was built around an autobiographical or even autofictional narrative, creating intimate spaces in which intersubjectivities merge. These provided the opportunity for artistic creations, like the film Black Moon, which was the starting point, the mise en abyme, and the unfolding of the narrative suggested in the exhibition.

Born in 1976 in Bucharest, Sinziana Ravini holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of Gothenburg, a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Heidelberg, and more recently a master’s in psychoanalysis. Sinziana Ravini lives and works in Paris.

Title Black Moon

Date 2013

Materials Video

Dimensions 29 minutes 59 seconds

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Nouvelles vagues, Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 21 Jun. to 09 Sep. 2013

Black Moon depicts the reunion of a man and a woman infatuated with each other in the exhibition of the same name. Through a discussion of the works on display, the two protagonists begin a dialogue marked by philosophical questions about love and their potential future together. In the course of this discussion, two philosophical principles emerge: on the one hand, a “random materialism” in pursuit of furtive encounters, and on the other, a “romantic idealism.” Taken from Sinziana Ravini’s book Black Moon, the scenes were filmed in the rooms of the “exhibition-film” presented at the Palais de Tokyo in 2013 before being screened there. In the continuity of her “exhibition-novels,” Sinziana Ravini is curator, director, and writer, blurring the boundaries between these different disciplines. The film is at once the starting point of the narrative suggested by the juxtaposition of the works, its mise en abyme, and its extension. It makes the exhibition space a possible place of projection where intersubjectivities merge.

Suzana Danilovic

Magali Reus

Date and place of birth: 1981, The Hague, Netherlands Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

In her artistic approach, Magali Reus focuses both on the beauty of things and the place they occupy in an industrial and domestic world. Her observations focus on various objects which, because they are part of our daily lives, no longer attract our attention. She isolates certain elements of these ready-made objects and reconfigures them to bring about a new entity. These plates, glasses, or rolls of toilet paper form the starting point of an immediate chain of associations. Shapes, colours, sounds, and possible movements naturally become part of the creative process. The result is a sculpture made up of several layers, which are themselves formed by the assembly of various materials, whether recovered or manufactured.

Born in 1981 in The Hague, Magali Reus studied art at Goldsmiths College in London and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. She lives and works in London.

Title In place of (Mint)

Date 2015

Materials Fibreglass, polyester resin, pigments, spray paint, steel, stainless steel, rubber, phosphated and powder-coated polyurethane

Dimensions 127 × 170 × 29.5 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Art Basel Miami Beach 2015, Miami from 03 to 06 Dec. 2015

Particle of Inch, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield from 18 Jul. to 11 Oct. 2015

Spring for a ground, Sculpturecenter, New York from 03 May to 05 Jul. 2015

Several materials are grafted onto an imposing white base. Alongside a comb and small cardboard boxes, other less identifiable artefacts have been placed in an orderly fashion to form a clear and uncluttered ensemble. In place of (Mint) is one of the variations of the In place of series which was exhibited in several galleries in 2015. Magali Reus recovered street curbs that serve as the main structures on which she grafts other components. Installed on the ground, this combination, which is reminiscent of an architectural model, can be viewed from several angles. The porosity of the border between architecture and sculpture at the heart of this work invites us to rethink space and objects. For example, an object such as a comb emerges from the intimacy of the bathroom and is given centre stage outside. The whole seems both tidy and untidy. It makes the viewer wonder how this construction was made and what else could be added to it.

Audrey Pellerin

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

Date and place of birth: 1975, La Rochelle, France Lives and works in Grenoble, France

Lili Reynaud-Dewar is an artist, writer, editor, and teacher known for her multi-faceted collaborative projects. She works alone or collectively, using autobiographical material or elements borrowed from transgressive figures in twentieth-century cultural production, such as Joséphine Baker, Guillaume Dustan, Bjarne Melgaard, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Rather than focusing on a single theme or guiding principle, her work attempts to bring social and political issues into the aesthetic field, and to bring to light the contradictions of such an undertaking. Through a broad range of references, she explores the history of racial and sexual emancipation, the circulation and interpretation of artworks, biographical motifs in cultural production, and the shifting figure of the artist in a globalised world.

Born in 1975 in La Rochelle, Lili Reynaud-Dewar studied ballet and public law before studying at the Beaux-Arts de Nantes and the Glasgow School of Art. She lives and works in Grenoble.

Title Teeth, gums, machines, future, society

Date 2016

Materials HD video, aluminium, trash, offset print on affiche paper

Dimensions 127 × 170 × 29.5 cm

Acquisition date 2016

The installation Teeth, gums, machines, future, society comprises a series of works, see p. 249 Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Dents, gencives, machines, futur, société, Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris from 18 Jul. to 11 Oct. 2015 TEETH, GUMS, MACHINES, FUTURE, SOCIETY, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, from 24 Sep. to 20 Nov. 2016

In 2016, Lili Reynaud Dewar went to Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated in the 1968 sanitation strike led by African- American workers, to make the video Teeth, Gums, Machine, Future, Society. The resulting installation hinges on two references: the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, where the cyborg is an expression of the intersection between class, race, and gender, and its current manifestation which is a person who wears a grill, a dental prothesis made of precious metal popular in hip-hop culture. In this work, made in collaboration with four artists from stand-up, noise music and contemporary art, Lili Reynaud Dewar takes as a point of departure her white European identity: she reveals the process of cultural appropriation, the construction of African-American empowerment, and the vulnerability of the body and its representation in public spaces.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

Title Teeth, gums, machines, future, society

Date 2016

Materials Aluminium, trash

Dimensions 145 × 72 × 16 cm

Acquisition date 2016

The work is part of the installation Teeth, gums, machines, future, society, see p. 248

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

TEETH, GUMS, MACHINES, FUTURE, SOCIETY, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, from 24 Sep. to 20 Nov. 2016

Dents, gencives, machines, futur, société, Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris from 18 Jul. to 11 Oct. 2015

Title Teeth, gums, machines, future, society

Date 2016

Materials HD video

Dimensions 35 minutes 59 secondes

Acquisition date 2016

The work is part of the installation Teeth, gums, machines, future, society, see p. 248

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

TEETH, GUMS, MACHINES, FUTURE, SOCIETY, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, from 24 Sep. to 20 Nov. 2016

Dents, gencives, machines, futur, société, Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris from 18 Jul. to 11 Oct. 2015

Samuel Richardot

Date and place of birth: 1982, Aurillac, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Samuel Richardot’s painting combines systematism and rigour in the application of geometric stencils, chance and contingency in the use of diluted paint dried flat, and a rapidity of gesture with spray painting. Various operations carried out on the same canvas follow one another in their own temporality. Samuel Richardot’s pictorial oeuvre thus makes its production process visible which, for the artist, is conceived as a choreography, a composition established from existing forms and variations in the way they are arranged.

Born in 1982 in Aurillac, Samuel Richardot graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in 2006.

Title 23/10-11/01 13

Date 2013

Samuel Richardot’s paintings are based both on randomness and method. The artist produces pictorial works over a long period of time by observing the movements of the fluid material of paint, diluted, dried flat, or sprayed. The blue wash of 23/10-11/01 13 (2013), where the vagaries of the drying process give rise to abstract forms, met with clean lines and full forms. Samuel Richardot draws the frames in which the pictorial material will evolve for as long as it takes. Each layer—blue, white, pink—dries in due course, thereby determining the moment in which the next appears. This formal grammar associated with the inherent rules of the material speaks to a reflection on the artistic process, the pictorial genre, and the nature of paint.

Samuel Richardot

Title Lizard Point

Date 2015

Materials Acrylic paint, canvas

Dimensions 162 × 130 × 2.5 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Ligne aveugle, ISBA - Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts de Besançon, Besançon from 30 Sep. to 12 Nov. 2015

In Lizard Point, the paint is constrained into a series of forms. Samuel Richardot has developed a pictorial language in which stencils frame the paint, which he then liquefies and spreads, observing the vagaries of the drying process over several weeks. The artist has in fact set up a sequenced work process: the slow production conditioned by the evolution of the material is preceded or succeeded by the rapid, distinct gesture of spray paint, an almost immediate material, to add swathes of colour. Lizard Point can thus be read as the decomposition of the vocabulary of a palimpsest painting.

Évariste Richer

Date and place of birth: 1969, Montpellier, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

For Évariste Richer, “some works are like opaque veils and surfaces for the projection of the imagination”. Indeed, the artist gives the notion of enigma an important place in his work. In many ways, his creations are aesthetic transfigurations of physical phenomena, of mathematical or phenomenological problems. His multidisciplinary practice is not based on a specific medium, but on working methods grounded in epistemological rigour. Rather than answers to these scientific questions, his works function as challenges to the viewers’ capacity for theorization and abstraction, and above all, to their capacity for imagination.

Born in 1969 in Montpellier, Évariste Richer studied at the École nationale des Beaux-arts de Grenoble and at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Avalanche II

Date 2012

Materials 60,000 standard dice

Dimensions 508 × 346.5 × 1.6 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Faites vos jeux, Les Franciscaines, Deauville from 24 Jun. to 17 Sep. 2023

Par hasard vol. II, La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille from 17 Oct. 2019 to 24 Feb. 2020

Avalanche, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels from 06 Sep. to 26 Oct. 2013

Art Basel 2013, Basel from 13 to 16 Jun. 2013

Substrat, Centre international d’art et du paysage - île de Vassivière, Beaumont-du-Lac

from 14 Oct. 2012 to 06 Jan. 2013

Un Nouveau Festival II, Centre Pompidou, Paris

from 16 Feb. to 07 Mar. 2011

Avalanche II is a work made up of approximately 60,000 dice that appear to be placed on the floor in a random order, but in fact follow a very precise arrangement to reconstitute the image of an avalanche: the six sides of the dice correspond to the six shades of grey of the avalanche photograph chosen by the artist (side “1” being almost white, and side “6” almost black). They are placed next to each other without being glued (to each other or to the floor), which gives the ensemble a feeling of fragility, since it risks coming apart with the slightest clumsy kick. By fixing the force of the avalanche that carries everything away, the artist suspends time. The surge of powder is rendered by a multitude of dice, like so many flakes that make up the mass of snow tumbling down the mountain. Sensitive to the notion of chance, to its triggering and its consequences, the artist proposes here a work with multiple readings. Games have roots in all cultures and all eras. By using the dice—the ultimate accessory of the game—as a basic material, Évariste Richer perfectly united the object and the subject. An avalanche is a contingent phenomenon and its triggering is subject to multiple factors that seem as random as a throw of the dice.

Pop Up 9, 44 GL, Paris from 22 Nov. to 13 Dec. 2016

Michael Riedel

Date and place of birth: 1972, Rüsselsheim, Germany Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Michael Riedel creates paintings, artists’ books, magazines, websites, videos, and installations. He appropriates texts online and converts them into shapes and colours according to a recognizable typographic aesthetic. Each of his works is therefore a reproduction of existing content. He draws his material from different sources: transcriptions of sound recordings of conversations, HTML code, Lorem Ipsum text, user manuals, etc. Since 2010, his main productions are the series Poster Paintings and PowerPoint Paintings

Title Untitled (17)

Date 2010

Materials Posters, canvas, wood frame, glue

Dimensions 232 × 176 × 9 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Michael Riedel, Galerie Michel Rein, Paris from 16 Oct. to 20 Nov. 2010

Untitled (17) brings includes all the typical elements of Michael Riedel’s aesthetic: the black circles on a white background, the barely visible text arranged both horizontally and vertically, with one word, in this case “Slideshow,” enlarged. This work belongs to the Poster Paintings series, generated from the HTML code of websites commenting on his work. He randomly selects a portion of the code and formats it by enlarging one of the words. These words are chosen in reference to the production gestures of his works (printing, clicking, scrolling). Added to this are painted black circles that evoke Apple’s spinning wheel that appears in the event of a system overload. This series pushes reproducibility to the limit by creating a self-sustaining system in which the works, by generating online comments, produce the material necessary to create new paintings.

Romane Grouille

Jimmy Robert

Date and place of birth: 1975, Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Video artist, author, sculptor, and choreographer, Jimmy Robert has many talents which he uses in the creation of works often conceived as composite ensembles (video, sculpture, dance) where each element echoes the others. His sources of inspiration are varied, from the Nouveau Roman to feminist and queer movements. He draws on these references to feed his reflections on communication, absence, borders, and alienation. As the bearer of its own history, language is neither neutral nor universal. It is this specificity that interests the artist so deeply.

Born in 1975 in Saint-Claude, Jimmy Robert received the Andrei & Nicholas Tooth Travelling Scholarship in 1999, the Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus scholarship in 2009, and the AIMIA/AGO Photography Prize in 2016. He lives and works in Berlin.

Title Non-scene

Date 2008

Materials Mixed media

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Jimmy Robert Vis-à-vis

MCA - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago from 25 Aug. to 25 Nov. 2012

Antidote 5, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 20 Oct. 2009 to 09 Jan. 2010

Un-scene, Wiels, Brussels from 29 Nov. 2008 to 22 Feb. 2009

Above all, Non-scene is the result of a performance. While one performer draws abstract lines in charcoal, another performer sitting on a stage recites song titles one after the other, creating a new text that is sometimes humorous, sometimes poetic. Movement and sound come together. The television set broadcasts the recording of this performance. The stage here is a miniature theatre set that echoes the questions of representation and roles implied by the title of the work. The term non-scene refers to a gay man who chooses to reject the codes of the queer community in order to fit in as closely as possible with heterosexual references. Jimmy Robert asks his audience about playing a role more generally. Is it just a posture? Is it a political act, or is it apolitical? The political dimension of language and its expressions occupies a central place in Jimmy Robert’s work: “Who is speaking? And who speaks for whom? To forget these questions when looking at my work would be to omit a major facet of it.”

Audrey Pellerin

Pietro Roccasalva

Date and place of birth: 1970, Modica, Italy

Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Pietro Roccasalva identifies as a painter, although he uses other media such as installation, sculpture, performance, video, and photography. This combination of different techniques gives rise to tableaux vivants (or situazione d’opera). Throughout his work, painting is a preliminary stage in his production process. The artist often resorts to mises en abyme by integrating a previously executed work in his creations, and constantly draws on an iconography borrowed from art or cinema.

Title The Skeleton Key (His Latest Flame)

Date 2009

Materials Synthetic voice recorded on vinyl

Dimensions 195 × 123 cm (framed oil on canvas)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions The unborn museum, Le Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble from 09 Jun. to 01 Sep. 2013

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Fare Mondi 53 Esposizione Internazionale D’arte, Venice Biennale, Venice from 07 Jun. to 22 Nov. 2009

This installation was presented in its complete version, consisting of six paintings and a turntable, at the Venice Biennale in 2009. The elevator man, a parody of the hero of the film Groom Service, has appeared in many of the artist’s performances and paintings since 2003. In love with Molly Bloom, a fictional character from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the bellboy convinced his creator to produce the famous singer’s first album. This impossible love gives rise to a red vinyl record without sound that spins each day to the rhythm of the sun.

Clément Rodzielski

Date and place of birth: 1979, Albi, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

In his constant search for innovative installation approaches, Clément Rodzielski extracts images from their constant flow to explore their modes of production, circulation, duplication, and relationships. With minimal gestures, his work explores the abstract materiality of different media through collage, cutting, and masking through the regular use of spray paint. He aims to reveal our contemporary optical unconscious by exposing the mechanisms of appearance and disappearance of images.

Born in 1979 in Albi, Clément Rodzielski is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris. He participated in the 11th Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize exhibition in 2009 and his works are held in the Centre Pompidou collection, among others. He lives and works in Paris. Title

Some postcards, the ultimate obsolete objects, are displayed on a wooden plate. Their presentation is reminiscent of a 1980s-style pinning of images to a cork board. As these recycled images are of no particular interest to the viewer, they can concentrate on the use that Clément Rodzielski makes of them. Riddled with drilled holes, they have undergone a barbaric treatment of erasure of their subjects, evoking the passage of time that blurs the images in our memories.

Clément Rodzielski

Title Untitled Date 2008

Materials Gouache, wood panel

Dimensions 108 × 108 × 2 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Title Untitled Date 2008

Materials Gouache, wood panel

Dimensions 55 × 127 × 1 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

By departing from the traditional canvas associated with painting, Clément Rodzielski generates an alternative space and a different perception of images through their indexical recovery. This black monochrome geometry is disrupted in its centre by a cut-out revealing curved forms similar to certain tattoo motifs popular in contemporary urban culture. The wall thus becomes a skin, a sensitive surface that contrasts with the piece’s apparent minimalism. This work from the Grands a series plays on imbalance and the mise en abyme of the frame, as well as on the effects of displacement or loss intrinsic to the circulation of images. By highlighting multiple points of view with minimal but effective gestures, the artist invites us to rethink the networks of distribution and their impact on the constitution of a common visual taste.

Veronika Doszla

The question of the frame, a significant issue in our reading of the world, is central in the works of Clément Rodzielski. Here, the artist has cut into a wooden panel fixed to the wall in order to create a display device for this wall drawing which evokes the sensuality of the many female backs tattooed with this motif. The skin of the wood matches the evanescent curves of the sketch, further accentuating the centrifugal sensations and dizzying nature of this unusual embedding. This perforated rectangular mass seems to open up towards another dimension, but by affirming its flatness, it maintains the paradox of masking in order to reveal. Through the use of mimicry, Untitled represents the phenomena of dispersion and dissolution inherent in the circulation of contemporary images, while at the same time creating a new analogical system withing the shifting interstices that led to the Grands a series.

Veronika Doszla

Clément Rodzielski

Title Untitled Date 2008

Materials Spray paint, paper

Dimensions 140 × 98 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

Title Untitled Date 2008

Materials pH neutral paper, MDF panels

Dimensions 180 × 111 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 4, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 09 Oct. to 06 Dec. 2008

In a type of breakthrough in the exhibition space, an intense black monochrome resting against the wall absorbs the light, standing like a screen in front of another work on paper that protrudes discreetly above it. Now inaccessible, this eclipsed composition suggests a different indexical system for the appearance of images. Through the regular use of spray paint on samples drawn from the visual continuum, Clément Rodzielski asserts a gesture of “mechanical” erasure associated with wooden panels that he conceives as “sources and vehicles of mural traces”. Each element of Untitled has been rethought according to a specific installation in the Grands a series in order to reveal the fluidity of the gaze and to broaden the pictorial possibilities to move towards a new perception of a painting can be.

Veronika Doszla

Contemporary to the Miroirs Noirs series (2008), Untitled explores visual artefacts by transforming geometric cutouts from magazines into enigmatic flat black surfaces that the artist has created through superimposition by spray painting the following pages. The result, which plays on the mechanical interference of image production, is then digitised, printed in large format, and partially affixed to a diptych of medium wood panels leaning against the wall and distributed at different heights along a staircase. Here, the stereotypical media representation of idyllic interiors is disrupted by a process of partial obscuring, suggesting their smoothness and superficiality. By drawing on the diverse flow of images (Internet, press, film), Clément Rodzielski significantly alters its materiality to question our representation of the world, adding the series Grands a like a swansong to an art that can now be perceived as symbols.

Veronika Doszla

Clément Rodzielski

Title Témoin vert

Date 2013

Materials Paper, aluminium

Dimensions 28 × 55 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Title Témoin orange

Date 2013

Materials Paper, aluminium

Dimensions 28 × 55 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Témoin vert is an edition of 150 copies from the eponymous series in six vivid colours. This original work consists of a digital print which is secretly housed in a coloured aluminium cylinder, an echo to the object used in relay races, to the spirit of mutual support in the artistic sphere, and to the circulation of images which pass through successive media filters. Clément Rodzielski examines the effects of visual and semantic disappearance under the action of spray paint, a monochrome covering gesture often used in his practice of visual sampling. Only a thin sinuous line gives a glimpse of the original image, a testament to the introspective visual process which reveals its physical qualities and temporal stratification.

Veronika Doszla

Témoin orange is an edition of 150 copies from the eponymous series in six vivid colours. This original work consists of a digital print which is secretly housed in a coloured aluminium cylinder, an echo to the object used in relay races, to the spirit of mutual support in the artistic sphere, and to the circulation of images which pass through successive media filters. Clément Rodzielski examines the effects of visual and semantic disappearance under the action of spray paint, a monochrome covering gesture often used in his practice of visual sampling. Only a thin sinuous line gives a glimpse of the original image, a testament to the introspective visual process which reveals its physical qualities and temporal stratification.

Veronika Doszla

Rachel Rose

Date and place of birth: 1986, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Rachel Rose’s videos and installations deal with our definition of mortality through subjects as diverse as zoos, a robotic perception laboratory, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and the American Revolutionary War. She integrates these locations into a series of views on death that address both the notion of vulnerability and catastrophe and the impact of history on our lifespan.

Born in 1986, Rachel Rose holds a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University (2009, Humanities and Art), a Master of Arts from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2010, Art History) and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in New York (2013, Visual Arts). She lives and works in New York.

Title A Minute Ago

Date 2014

Materials HD video

Dimensions 8 minutes 43 seconds

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Rachel Rose’s video A Minute Ago is a sensory experience between synchrony, déjà vu and disappearance. This experience emerges in the different sequences of the work: a hailstorm suddenly falling on a beach where, two minutes earlier, everyone was sunbathing or swimming, then the visit of the famous Glass House by its architect and owner Philip Johnson, who disappeared before the work was completed and reintegrated as a blurred figure in the image. The video progresses to the sound of Pink Floyd playing in Pompeii in 1971 in front of an absent audience, then to the rhythm of Steve Reich’s percussions (Music for Pieces of Wood), which chant the pulverization of the image and announce the vibrant appearance of the Landscape with the funeral of Nicolas Poussin’s Phocion. Playing on notions of presence and present, A Minute Ago attempts to stitch together two realities, two moments in time.

Rachel Rose

Title The Camargue Horse

Date 2020

Materials Acrylic, aluminium

Dimensions 121.9 × 91.4 × 2.5 cm

Acquisition date 2020

Exhibitions Rachel Rose, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 13 Mar. to 13 Sep. 2020

In one of her rare static, two-dimensional works, Rachel Rose brings together the real and the imaginary, the documentary and the dreamlike, classical landscape in the style of Nicolas Poussin and fiction. In an imagined landscape constructed from a photograph, a white horse running free in marshland and the disquieting shape of a black egg stand side by side. While the Camargue horse is a cultural and touristic symbol, the white horse refers to myths (such as the chariot of the sun in Greco-Roman antiquity) or to leading artists (such as George Stubbs or Paul Gauguin). The egg has interested Rachel Rose since 2016 and her installation Autoscopic Egg: since her pregnancy, she has associated it with the idea of life and protection, imbuing it with a universal symbolic power. This association questions the environments we think we know insofar as “we ourselves, as living beings, form the landscape”, to use the artist’s own words.

Chiara Perez

Sylvain Rousseau

Date and place of birth: 1979, Saint-Nazaire, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Sylvain Rousseau’s work and visual research are structured around the flattening of volumes and forms. The artist transforms the threedimensional object into a two-dimensional image through a process of displacement and appropriation that situates his works between sculpture and painting. By using the original materials of the objects he flattens, he plays on our perception of the works and challenges the conventions of representation. His “painting-objects” thus allow him to comment on the status of the image.

Born in 1979 in Saint-Nazaire, Sylvain Rousseau studied at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. He was a member of the artist collective Glassbox from 2003 to 2007. He lives and works in Paris.

Title House of the Rising Sun

Date 2007

Materials Glass, wood, fabric, concrete, resin, plastic

Dimensions 300 × 400 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Between sculpture and painting, House of the Rising Sun represents two isolated workers’ garden sheds on a white surface. Taken out of context, they direct our attention to the structures and the forms and materials that they are made of. This section of landscape, both flat and raised, disturbs our perception of space. Made from the original materials, it combines glass, wood, fabric, and concrete, among others, to give a flattened reality to the represented sheds. By working on depth and materials, Sylvain Rousseau flattens the initial structures, transforming the three-dimensional object into a twodimensional image. A “painting-object” which plays with the displacement and perception of images, House of the Rising Sun questions our way of receiving the works and the world they represent.

Suzana Danilovic

Cameron Rowland

Date and place of birth: 1988, Philadelphia, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Cameron Rowland has worked with architectural firms in both New York and Copenhagen, experiences which have heavily influenced his work. His installations often explore the relationship between the exhibition space and public space. The artist also pays attention to the history of the places where his installations take place, as well as their particular physical and aesthetic properties.

Born in 1988 in Philadelphia, Cameron Rowland received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in Middletown (Connecticut, USA). He lives and works in New York.

Title Intermediate Preventive

Date 2015

Materials Pipes, cables, pipe straps

Dimensions 4.5 × 342.9 × 4.5 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Intermediate Preventive is used for cables and wires installed outside” says Cameron Rowland. “It was designed for safety lighting or a surveillance camera. The metallic sheath prevents the cables from being cut. Intermediate Preventive is also made up of an ultra-resistant lighting system commonly used by New York’s Housing Authority. This light integrated into the work could never be part of a collection; it will always remain the property of the artist”. Inverting the usual relationship between artwork and viewer, Intermediate Preventive is a device that may be looking at you, while it foils those devices artists surrender to when they cede ownership of their work. The work points a mocking finger at economic domination in the art world, and seeks to actively resist it.

Sara Sadik

Date and place of birth: 1994, Bordeaux, France

Lives and works in Marseille, France

In works drawing on video, photography, performance, and installation, Sara Sadik deploys the aesthetic of beurcore, a term she coined to describe the culture of the young North African diaspora in France. She uses popular references such as rap, video games, and street food, as well as a familiar vernacular spoken with a Marseille accent. These generational references—which are usually maligned—are invoked with humour and irony in works that question masculinity and play on social clichés, particularly in relation to the suburbs, and carry a political discourse with the intention of social legitimisation.

Born in Bordeaux (France) in 1994, Sara Sadik is a graduate of the École des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux. She now lives in Marseille.

The hero of this video is sitting a recruitment exam for a special military force. The work draws both on documentary and video game aesthetics, in particular the camera movements that bring together the protagonist and the viewer in an empathetic movement. Produced in three parts, Force & Honneur is typical of Sara Sadik's stories of initiation, in which she portrays young men from immigrant backgrounds. The neologism beurcore (the term beur refers to French people of North African descent) coined by the artist encapsulates the influences of her daily life and popular culture such as science fiction, fashion, and rap. Here we find one of her favourite subjects, the conditioning of masculinity linked to physical and psychological strength, a vision that Sara Sadik aims to deconstruct. With this piece, whose title can be seen as referring to the film Gladiator as well as to French rap, she also criticises the propaganda often associated with the military world.

Louise Glodt-Chauchoy

Title Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur (Vol.1)

Date 2022

Materials HD video

Dimensions 23 minutes 33 seconds

Acquisition date 2022

Exhibitions Ultimate Vatos, Crèvecœur, Paris from 21 May to 23 Jul. 2022

Art Basel 2022, Basel from 16 to 19 Jun. 2022

Eirik Sæther

Date and place of birth: 1983, Oslo, Norway

Lives and works in Oslo, Norway

Since 2010, Eirik Sæther has developed a multidisciplinary practice combining sculpture, installation, and video. He draws his inspiration from popular culture and takes up the heritage of the ready-made by giving it a more serious and macabre dimension. His works question the way in which we shape our identities as well as the perpetually blurred line between truth, lies, and illusion.

Born in 1983 in Oslo, Eirik Sæther graduated from the National School of Art in Oslo in 2010. He is part of a logic of collective creation and participates in many artists’ groups, notably the Norwegian collective Institutt for Degenerert Kunst (2008–2015). He lives and works in Oslo.

Title Stueren

Date 2016

Materials Welded steel, wool, screws, silk, garlic moulded in epoxy resin, polyester fabric, lacquer on cotton, inkjet print on polyester fabric, dog collar, polyurethane foam

Dimensions 120 × 50 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Limbo, Galerie Édouard Montassut, Paris from 14 Jan. to 11 Feb. 2016

The multiplicity of materials that make up this sculpture clearly reflects its polymorphic nature: the confoundingly hyperrealistic polyurethane casts of the artist’s feet come together with a dog collar, synthetic fur, wool, or garlic cloves moulded in resin. Here, Eirik Sæther utilizes an aesthetic of kitsch and bad taste that is both punk and glamorous, whose exuberance is counterbalanced by the presence of feet tied with an animal collar evoking the chains that used to tie the feet of slaves. The figure of the shop-window mannequin, here evoked by the steel rack supporting what looks like a skirt, is recurrent in Eirik Sæther’s work. Its apparent banality is often tinged with a macabre or disturbing dimension, as is the case here.

Marianne Tricoire

Yorgos Sapountzis

Date and place of birth: 1976, Athens, Greece Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Yorgos Sapountzis is known for his interdisciplinary approach to art. He creates works in which video, sound, sculpture, installation, and performance come together to form complex spaces that explore how we come into contact and interact with our environment. His artistic vocabulary is always the same: coloured textiles, aluminium tubes, newspaper, and plaster sculpture casts are combined to produce temporary structures that reconfigure exhibition spaces and alter our perception of them.

Born in 1976 in Athens, Yorgos Sapountzis graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts (1998–2002) and the Berlin University of the Arts (2002–6). He lives and works in Berlin.

Title Redial Monument Dog and Makigiaz

Date 2013

Materials Aluminium, plastic, plaster, fabric, mixed media

Dimensions 400 × 1,000 × 500 cm

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Yorgos Sapountzis is fascinated by monuments and public statuary. His sculptural installations oscillate between the immutable and the evolutive, the static and the animated, order and chaos. The composite work Redial Monument Dog and Makigiaz hangs together in a delicate balance, like scaffolding deploying its members in a disjointed choreography. The feet of the structure, each one marking a dance step, are set in vegetable tins. The use of perishable materials together with plaster and resin connect two opposing axes: the body, which is temporal, and the memorial, which is supposedly eternal. Makeshift sculptures also lie strewn on the ground, made from adhesive tape. They represent the head, hands, and feet of the statue of the Austrian patriarch Anton Schneider in Bregenz, symbolizing a certain tendency of monuments to crumble.

Bojan Šarčević

Date and place of birth: 1974, Belgrade, Serbia

Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland

Bojan Šarčević’s pluridisciplinary practice (sculpture, video installation, photography, collage) focuses on spaces and architecture. His works are built around the juxtaposition of lines and forms, drawing geometric structures in a state of equilibrium imbued with the vocabulary of modernist and art deco architecture. Through a process of formal and conceptual abstraction, he appropriates these historical languages while questioning the poetic and political implications of the materials and styles he uses.

Born in 1974 in Belgrade, Bojan Šarčević studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Manifesta 2 Biennial in Luxembourg (1998), the Tate Modern in London, the Berlin Biennial, and the Venice Biennale (2003). Bojan Šarčević lives and works in Basel.

Title Keep Illusion for the End

Date 2005

Materials Oak, brass, copper, concrete

Dimensions 250 × 140 × 216 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Éventuellement, Le Grand Café - Centre d’art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire from 10 Apr. to 06 Jun. 2010

Keep Illusion for the End is a freestanding structure consisting of an irregular wooden polygon on which brass, copper, concrete, and wood frames are hung. By playing with perspective and angles, Bojan Šarčević offers the viewer a true experience of the sculpture and the space in which it is situated. The forms and lines overlap, intermingle, and are juxtaposed, generating multiple points of view. The silhouette of the main frame is repeated and extended through the structures it supports, which act as afterimages. The whole is thus presented as a succession of framings evoking an architectural device, an ornamental framework imbued with the art deco style. Through a process of abstraction, Bojan Šarčević extracts the ornament from the building it covers in order to recontextualise it within his work and deploy its full poetic potential. Following the same principle, the artist has also created Everything makes sense in the reverse, a more rounded double of Keep Illusion for the End

Suzana Danilovic

Joe Scanlan

Date and place of birth: 1961, Stoutsville, United States

Lives and works in New York, United States

Joe Scanlan’s approach highlights the role and position of the artist within contemporary capitalist society. In an ironic and disillusioned vision, he sees art as a form of production in a very focused market in which his sculptures and theoretical writings have a place as products. He also makes paintings from the wood scraps that litter his studio and signs these works with the name of his fictional alter ego, the AfricanAmerican artist Donnelle Woolford.

Born in 1961 in Stoutsville, Ohio, Joe Scanlan is a graduate of the College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He heads the Visual Arts department at Princeton University and regularly publishes articles in ArtForum magazine. He lives and works in New York.

Title AD N°1

Date 2006

Materials Light box

Dimensions 150 × 120 × 20 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Diversification, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris from 04 Sep. to 03 Oct. 2009

Intouchable, L’idéal Transparence, Villa Arson, Nice from 01 Jul. to 24 Sep. 2006

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

With this light box from the Mood Piece series, Joe Scanlan updates the image of the weeping woman in a sober, cold, almost artificial version. In reality, it is a piece of advertising for his work which integrates the notion of commerce, supply, and demand into his practice. It is always through irony that the artist seeks to arouse desire and the notion of profit. In 1999, he designed the miniature sculpture Catalyst, of which this photograph is the advertising image: the artist offers potential buyers a series of transparent acrylic tears intended to be worn as jewellery or make-up on the skin. On the box containing these tears is a sentence that sums up his approach: “Wear Catalyst whenever you want to pretend you have feelings.” This could be seen as a hijacked reference to Man Ray’s photograph Tears (1936), which features a cabaret dancer with tears painted on her face, but Joe Scanlan’s intention is quite different. Through the sale of tears, he proposes that we feign an emotion in order to modify the behaviour of those around us. “Wear one on the subway and someone might give you their seat. Or wear one at a party, just for laughs.”

Marianne Tricoire

Markus Schinwald

Date and place of birth: 1973, Salzburg, Austria

Lives and works between Vienna, Austria and New York, United States

Markus Schinwald’s installations, videos, sculptures, and performances explore the question of the body and its interaction with space. By blurring the boundaries between the strange and the familiar, revealing a bourgeois world with its share of physical deviances and prosthetic accessories, the works shake up conventions, identities, and sexualities. The notions of desire, voyeurism, and fetishism, expressed both psychologically and performatively, forcefully alienate the viewer.

Born in 1973 in Salzburg, Markus Schinwald studied at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin (Germany) and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Linz (Austria). He lives and works between Vienna and New York.

Title Rose

Date 2009

Materials Wood, oil paint

Dimensions 50 × 35.5 × 5 cm (framed work)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Markus Schinwald, Yvon Lambert New York, New York from 14 Jan. to 20 Feb. 2010

This painting is part of a series of nineteenth-century portraits whose faces Markus Schinwald has retouched. By adding masks, veils, nets, and bandages without the figures seeming to suffer, these prostheses constrain, cut off speech, blind or, as is the case here with a few bubbles, isolate this Rose from immediate reality. The artist buys these portraits at auction or on eBay, restores them, modifies them, and then refines them with an expert touch, completing the transformation of the strange into the familiar.

Markus Schinwald

Title Untitled (legs) #09

Date 2009

Materials Wooden chair legs, pedestal

Dimensions 157 × 80 × 80 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

With its Chippendale-style curved chair legs, this sculpture at first evokes a melancholy pas de deux, but the arabesque, a little too raised, immediately recalls the contortionists recurrent in the artist’s films and photographs, whose performances oscillate between horror and fascination. By questioning the mechanisation of the body through fashion or dance, Markus Schinwald also explores its physical and mental extension in petitbourgeois furniture.

ADAGP, Paris, 2015

Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld

Date and place of birth: 1979, Berlin, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Through a practice that encompasses sculpture, photography, performance, and installation, Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld explores the connections between nature and culture, the organic and the mechanical, mind and matter in works inspired by both the spiritual and scientific imaginaries, which she associates with different bodies of work (The Devices, The Labs, and The Oracles). Her creations question and deconstruct the concepts that they appropriate to offer new perspectives on the world.

Born in 1979 in Berlin, Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld studied at the Universität der Künste in her native city. She was a resident at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2011 and won the FOAM Talent Award in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, Italy, USA, France, Brazil, and Japan. She lives and works in Berlin.

Title Serpent Ritual

Date 2016

Materials Vacuum cleaner, snakeskin, timer

Dimensions 250 × 350 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Anatomy of Restlessness (Anatomia dell’irrequietezza)

Galleria Mario Iannelli, Rome from 11 May to 01 Jun. 2016

The installation Serpent Ritual combines the organic and the mechanical by bringing together a snake skin and a vacuum cleaner. The snake skin that goes through the exhibition wall is animated by the air propelled by the device to which it is connected. As part of the series The Devices, Serpent Ritual explores the “metaphysical dimension of everyday machines.” The work refers to the many traditional rituals associated with snakes, notably the Hopi tradition analysed by Aby Warburg in his book The Serpent Ritual, which Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld invokes in her description of the assemblage. The artist appropriates and updates the ritual by associating the animal with a vacuum cleaner. She links it to the etymology of the term “spirit,” i.e. to the breath that she tries to materialise within her installation. In this way, she infuses a spiritual dimension into the household appliance and offers a new perspective on our daily lives. In 2017, she created a new version of the installation for the exhibition Keep Being Touched at the Centre d’Art Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

Suzana Danilovic

Élodie Seguin

Date and place of birth: 1984, Paris, France

Lives and works in Avignon, France

Élodie Seguin claims influences as varied as Barnett Newman, Jason Dodge, Paul Cézanne, and Gustave Courbet. Her artistic language requires a pragmatic approach: while the environment and context in which she creates her works play a key role, it is the interdependence between each of the pieces that allows Élodie Seguin’s work to become a system. The physical limits of a work do not matter to this artist who integrates the specificities of the spaces of production and exhibition into her creations.

Born in 1984 in Paris, Élodie Seguin studied at the Villa Arson in Nice and at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris. She lives and works in Avignon.

Title Deux pièces

Date 2014

Materials Mixed media

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Venir Voir Venir, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 06 Jul. 2014

This site-specific installation bears witness to Élodie Seguin’s experience in the studio she occupied during her residency at the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in 2014. By fixing glass panes to one of the walls, the artist creates a symmetry that emphasizes the length of the room. The building opposite is reflected in it to the point of being almost reproduced between the walls of the studio. This aesthetic displaces beyond the surface the vocabulary of the glass and the prefabricated wall that permeates the second floor of the foundation.

The work was produced for the exhibition Venir Voir Venir which was held at Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in July 2014.

Tino Sehgal

Date and place of birth: 1976, London, United Kingdom Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Since the early 2000s, Tino Sehgal has created choreographed works that integrate performers into scenarios orchestrated around movement, singing, or conversation with spectators. His artistic approach, more akin to ballet and theatre than performance, is informed by his background in dance and economics, as well as by his conviction that our current system of production and consumption is both ecologically and socially unsustainable.

Born in 1976 in London, Tino Sehgal is a visual artist and choreographer. He studied conceptual art, contemporary dance, and economic theory at the Humboldt University and at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Berlin. A finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006 and the Turner Prize in 2013, he won the Golden Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Tino Sehgal lives and works in Berlin.

According to Tino Sehgal, this work, which was first presented in 2002, is a “constructed situation” in which two museum guards kiss each other every time a visitor enters the exhibition space. This piece takes on different variations, the couple being alternately made up of two men, two women, or a man and a woman. Here, the artist seeks to create an interaction with the spectator: by encouraging them to take on the role of a voyeur faced with this manifestation of affection, encouraging them to reflect on the subtle differences between the public space of the museum and more intimate private space. The visitor is no longer simply a passive spectator, but becomes a producer by taking part in the very realization of these situations. Tino Sehgal composes performance works whose mode of existence is entirely factual, since he prohibits any written or visual documentation relating to his productions. This approach allows him to propose a counter-model to mercantile consumption: to create something out of nothing (actions, words) and then let it disappear, without retaining any potentially marketable physical trace, but only the memory of the past moment.

Marianne Tricoire

Title Guards Kissing Date 2002

Materials

Dimensions

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Laura Sellies Amélie Giacomini

Dates and places of birth: 1989, Grenoble, France

1988, Lyon, France

Live and work in Paris, France Paris, France

Amélie Giacomini and Laura Sellies have been working together since 2009. They seek to go beyond the notion of ephemerality of performative works by connecting their practice to the concept of “post-performance” (Marie de Brugerolle). They combine performances, sculptures, sound installations, and videos in a work that explores the relationship between the body, language, space, and the notion of community. Through collaborative writing, they create works imbued with numerous literary references and populated with female characters that draw the viewer into immersive worlds.

Title Toutes ces filles couronnées de langues : les instruments

Date 2019

Materials Video installation made up of 5 sculptures (copper, electronic components) and two video projections with sound effects

Dimensions

0.3 × 149.5 × 40 cm (plate 1) 0.2 × 140 × 70 cm (plate 2)

0.2 × 120 × 50 cm (plate 3) 0.2 × 110 × 80 cm (plate 4)

0.2 × 99 × 99 cm (plate 5) 0.2 × 100 × 60 (plate 6) 11 minutes 16 seconds

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Feÿ 2019, Le festival d’arts Feÿ, Bourgogne from 20 to 22 Sep. 2019

In the sound and video installation Toutes ces filles couronnées de langues : les instruments, five “instrumentsculptures”—copper plates equipped with electronic components and scattered throughout the space— capture and amplify sound. To this device are added two videos projected simultaneously and accompanied by an immersive soundtrack. They are taken from the short film of the same name shot on the island of Lanzarote. The main character, Estrée, travels to the island of Kyrra where a community of women has invented a non-verbal language made up of gestures, songs, and sounds emitted by “instrument-sculptures.” The work questions the possibility of a new mode of communication liberated from everyday language, a tool of heteronormative domination. By moving through the sound and visual environment of the installation, the spectator is invited to project themselves into this narrative, both literally— through their shadow—and figuratively.

Romane

Grouille

Ser Serpas

Date and place of birth: 1995, Los Angeles, United States

Lives and works between New York, United States and Paris, France

The multidisciplinary work of Ser Serpas begins from discarded objects that bear the traces of their past use, disparate elements that the artist assembles to create a new form of harmony. Serpas considers this phase of composition to be crucial to her work, as the objects acquire a new importance when brought together. Her artistic practice is also expressed through poetry, or in paintings of fragmented and naked bodies. Her work questions notions of identity, intimacy, and sexuality.

Born in 1995 in Los Angeles, Ser Serpas studied at Columbia University in New York, then at the Geneva University of Art and Design. She lives and works between New York and Paris.

Title im not good at anything including this round the this time, 87 unused collected objects from the installation, at 84 Rue des Gravilliers and 15 framed pages of notes from Georgian language classes that the artist did not follow up on after the 8th lesson

Date 2021

Materials Wood, glass, mirror, cardboard, polystyrene

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2021

Exhibitions Ser Serpas, solo show, Balice Hertling, Paris from 16 Oct. to 04 Dec. 2021

For this installation, Serpas placed various discarded objects and fragments of furniture collected during her urban explorations on the floor against the walls. For her, the search for materials is the most time-consuming part of the creative process, as it only takes a few hours to combine these disparate elements together. Serpas considers this composition time as a private performance or choreography. These eighty-seven objects, which bear witness to their former life and abandonment, are combined with fifteen frames containing handwritten poems on paper. The juxtaposition of these heterogeneous elements creates a rhythm, a conversation that is brought about by the artist’s hand. Beyond description, the title of the work reveals the relationship between the creator and her installation.

Valentine Brégeon

Ser Serpas

Title Conjoining fabricated excesses literal end to a mean

Date 2021

Materials Wood, textile

Dimensions 117 × 165 × 96 cm

Acquisition date 2021

Exhibitions Ser Serpas, solo show, Balice Hertling, Paris from 16 Oct. to 04 Dec. 2021

The installation Conjoining fabricated excesses literal end to a mean consists of an old rolled-up mattress inserted into the hole in a wooden board, all materials found in the city. The former’s softness and suppleness contrasts with the stiffness and rigidity of the latter. Although she combines these heterogeneous elements without using adhesives or nails, Serpas manages to create a stability, even a harmony between these disparate objects. Where each element has lived independently and then been abandoned and doomed to destruction, the artist creates a new cohesion by highlighting their traces of use and merging them into an assemblage that is both monumental and fragile. The artist considers this timeconsuming process of finding and assembling materials as a genuine performance or a private choreography.

Valentine Brégeon

Timur Si-Qin

Date and place of birth: 1984, Berlin, Germany

Lives and works in New York, United States

Timur Si-Qin expresses himself through a multitude of media, often digital, such as 3D-printed sculptures, websites, light boxes, and virtual reality. He highlights the tensions running through our modern Western societies by mixing natural, artificial, and digital elements in his creations. His work embodies the contemporary theoretical debates around biology, technology, and materialism.

Born in 1984 in Berlin, Timur Si-Qin is an artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese origin who grew up in Berlin, Beijing, and the Southwestern United States. He studied at the University of Arizona. He lives and works in New York.

Title Change is Truth - A+B

Date 2018

Materials Aluminium, LED lighting

Dimensions 170 × 288 × 5.5 cm (overall installation) 170 × 135 × 5.5 cm (1 light box)

Acquisition date 2018

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

The works of Timur Si-Qin evoke, not without ambiguity, contemporary theoretical debates about biology, technology and materialism. Change is Truth raises paradoxes: change that is spelled out, such as in an advertising slogan, may be seen as an ode to the flux inherent to life or, on the contrary, a reference to consumerist habits shaped by programmed obsolescence, or perhaps an awakening to climate change. The illuminated screens that convey this message recall the ubiquitous advertisement screens of urban spaces. Uncertainty is inherent to the image itself: is it a close-up of a rocky ground or a bird’s-eye view of a desert landscape? The lack of scale invites viewers to rethink the position of Man in the midst of all this change.

Gedi Sibony

Date and place of birth: 1973, New York, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Between sculpture and installation, Gedi Sibony’s artistic practice is built around recovering discarded objects (carpet, used wood, cardboard, etc.). Mindful of the materiality of the objects he reuses, he explores the formal and expressive qualities of these shapeless materials and reveals their poetic potential through fragile arrangements. The resulting works constitute “spatial collages” that blend into the space in which they are exhibited. Close to minimal art, they disrupt our vision of space and thus renew our perspective.

Born in 1973 in New York, Gedi Sibony graduated from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world and is held in the collections of museums such as MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Title The Director’s Chair

Date 2006

Materials Wood, carpet

Dimensions

203.5 × 74 × 360 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Drawing Room 018, Salon du dessin contemporain, MO.CO Panacée, Montpellier from 03 to 28 Sep. 2018

Antidote 3, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 13 Sep. to 03 Nov. 2007

Gedi Sibony, Galerie Art:Concept, Paris from 02 Dec. 2006 to 08 Jan. 2007

A seemingly accidental assemblage, The Director’s Chair explores the formal and expressive qualities of “nonnoble” salvaged materials. On the floor of the exhibition space, Gedi Sibony has unrolled a carpet upside down and placed a large panel of worn wood against a wall. The whole thing looks unstable and fragile, on the verge of falling. The artist’s discreet intervention emphasises the materiality of the discarded objects he has used. In an approach close to Arte Povera, The Director’s Chair tends to reveal the poetic potential of the material in order to propose a sensitive experience. The work takes over the space it occupies and blends in with it, disrupting the viewer’s perception. In the continuity of minimal art, it engages in a reconfiguration of space that invites us to become aware of our relationship to objects and their environment.

Suzana Danilovic

Amie Siegel

Date and place of birth: 1974, Chicago, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Amie Siegel’s practice includes film, photography, performance, and installation. The artist questions the value of cultural memory and its gradual evolution towards the status of object or experience. She is also interested in the relationship between the body, gender, and architectural space, particularly through her view of the character Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and her interaction with the Casa Malaparte in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). This film is the starting point for a vast polymorphous series of installations, slide projections, performances, and works on paper.

Born in 1974 in Chicago, Amie Siegel graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. She is represented by Simon Preston Gallery (New York) and lives and works in New York.

Title Surrogates

Date 2016

Materials 27 colour slides

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Amie Siegel: High Noon, Ratio 3, San Francisco from 05 Apr. to 01 Jun. 2019

Interiors, Frye Art Museum, Seattle from 20 May to 03 Sep. 2017

Part 2. Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart from 30 Jan. to 16 May 2016

Surrogates is based on the continuous and silent projection of twenty-seven slides depicting sculptures from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. These photographs reveal the missing parts, gaps, and traces in the restoration of the ancient statues. These projections of female representations take on meaning and measure through their proximity to photographs of the character of Camille, played by Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). In front of the filmmaker’s camera, the actress covers and reveals herself sensually under a red sheet reminiscent of the wet drapery of ancient sculptures. By revealing the femininity of these figures, Amie Siegel comments on the male gaze, its influence, and its obsession with the female body throughout the ages. The artist invites us to dissect and examine this gendered view of a female body fetishized and objectified as an artefact or object. Furthermore, Siegel creates a mise en abyme of two representations of a feminine ideal, one ancient and the other contemporary, where the reproduction replaces the original and attracts the gaze. Finally, by showing specific views of the statues, these slides implicitly echo Contempt’s opening dialogue, in which Camille questions Paul by listing the parts of her body reflected in the mirror.

Quentin Rose

Gabriel Sierra

Date and place of birth: 1975, San Juan Nepomuceno, Colombia Lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia

Having started out as an industrial designer, Gabriel Sierra quickly oriented his practice towards the artistic field. His work, which is rooted in popular tradition while drawing on erudite references to the history of art and design, questions society and its cultural practices. Gabriel Sierra also works with physical spaces. His interventions often question the relationship between the viewer and the physical space, which is usually so obvious.

Born in 1975 in San Juan Nepomuceno, Gabriel Sierra attended the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá. He currently lives and works in Bogotá.

Gabriel Sierra’s works are based on the idea that forms and materials constitute an architectural language and that they can therefore be considered as systems for value transmission. The artist intervened directly in the spatial language of the foundation’s building prior to its renovation by replacing some of the windows and skylights with sheets of glass made from melted Perrier bottles: they alter not only the light, but also the atmosphere of the rooms in which they are located. In turn, the steps of a staircase that connects two levels have been modified. Their surface has been changed so that the experience of walking on them is renewed. Untitled (The Original Step) also reflects a particular context of the residency in which the artists were invited to read the space they knew would soon be reconfigured. The beauty of this work made in situ lies in its shortened life span: conceived for a now-destroyed part of the Foundation’s building, it is its mould and its memory.

Work created for the exhibition Venir Voir Venir at Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in 2014.

Title Untitled (The Original Step)

Brynjar Sigurðarson

Veronika Sedlmair

Dates and places of birth: 1985, Reykjavik, Iceland 1986, Immenstadt, Germany

Live and work in Berlin, Germany Berlin, Germany

Formed in 2014 by Brynjar Sigurðarson and Veronika Sedlmair, Studio Brynjar & Veronika is a design duo that uses different media (glass, stone, wood) and techniques (weaving, photography, collage). Their creations integrate design, craft, and sculpture. Icelandic culture is a source of inspiration for the studio, which draws on the country’s mythological repertoire, craft techniques, and traditions. The duo also seeks to capture the atmosphere of Icelandic places, which gives their research an unprecedented anthropological and geological dimension.

Thanks to the support of Lafayette Anticipations and the expertise of Parisian luthier Jean-Yves Roosen, Studio Brynjar & Veronika was able to create a circular flute 250 centimetres in diameter which is activated by four performers and a listener in the centre. The duo wanted to recreate an atypical experience composed of four simultaneous waves of sound and to showcase the dying art of certain craftsmanship through the creation of a virtuoso object. The instrument travelled in sixteen separate pieces in a suitcase to a fishing village in Iceland, Flattery, accompanied by the artist duo, flautists, and the composer Þráinn Hjálmarsson. The team worked there for eleven consecutive days in order to master circular breathing and develop all the acoustic possibilities, from quarter tones to wind sounds, in harmony with the grandiose volcanic landscape where the photograph was taken. At the end of the workshop, the performers put together a musical repertoire that changed the connections between the members of the quartet and thus shifted the relationship with the spectator in an allencompassing collective experience.

Veronika Doszla

Brynjar Sigurðarson

Veronika Sedlmair

Title The Circle Flute

Date 2016

Materials Circular flute in silver-plated brass

Dimensions 250 cm (diam.)

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions

Maerzmusik Festival – Festival für Zeitfragen, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, 18 Mar. 2022

Björk Cornucopia tour – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami

Björk Gudmundsdottir – Catherine Verna Bentley, London from 26 Jan. to 16 Feb. 2022

Björk European tour Björk from 31 Oct. to 16 Dec. 2019

Björk Cornucopia tour, Parque Bicentenario, Mexico City from 09 Aug. to 06 Sep. 2019

Björk Cornucopia tour, The Shed, New York from 02 May to 07 Jun. 2019

The Torsten & Wanja Söderbergs Prize 2018, Röhsska, Gothenburg from 23 Feb. to 12 May 2019

Cycle Music and Art Festival

Gerðarsafn - Kópavogur Art Museum, Hamraborg from 25 Oct. 2018 to 06 Jan. 2019

Musikfestival Bern, Bern from 05 to 09 Sep. 2018

U-JOINTS, Plusdesign Gallery, Milan from 13 to 22 Apr. 2018

Les traversées du marais festival, Marais Culture +, Paris from 08 to 10 Sep. 2017

Workshop - Musique contemporaine Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Vienna from 27 to 31 Mar. 2017

Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

The Circle Flute is a work created in 2016 for the exhibition Faisons de l’inconnu un allié. It is a circular flute with a diameter of 2.5 metres, consisting of four flutes. It is played by four musicians for a single listener who, placed in the centre, becomes a sounding board and has a physical experience that Brynjar Sigurðarson describes as therapeutic. The flute rests on four basalt stones, echoing the Icelandic rocky landscape. This project draws on the know-how of several specialists: flute-maker Jean-Yves Roosen and flutist Michael Schmid in creating a functional instrument, composer Prainn Hjalmarsson in harnessing the flute’s potential, and the talented musicians capable of practicing circular breathing, a rare technique. The sounds produced by the flute are inspired by traditional Icelandic music.

Romane Grouille

Michael E. Smith

Date and place of birth: 1977, Detroit, United States Lives and works in Hopkinton, United States

In his sculptures and paintings as well as his photographs and videos, Michael E. Smith combines discarded clothing, household appliances, crockery, taxidermied animals, and industrial materials. Although the unusual pairings and associations he creates form a strong, if not violent, act, they are not without humour: “Apocalyptic tragedy and anxiety seem far too harsh and intense not to carry their own necessary catharsis.” (Les Ateliers de Rennes, 2012)

Born in 1977 in Detroit, Michael E. Smith studied at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) in his native city, as well as at Yale University under Jessica Stockholder in the sculpture department. He currently lives and works in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

Title Untitled

Date 2012

Materials Fish skin, straw

Dimensions 21 × 28 × 64 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Des mondes aquatiques #1, Centre international d’art et du paysage –île de Vassivière, Beaumont-du-Lac from 19 Mar. to 05 Jun. 2017

Oscillating between the “physiology” and “psychology” of things, the works of Michael E. Smith offer an outline of the “archaeology of humanity”. His sculptures form a residual ensemble where emptiness is paramount. The artist proposes to confront the environmental and economic upheaval of our times by recovering abandoned objects. Having grown up in Detroit, an American city that has become the emblem of industrial decline, his work is deeply permeated by this collapse. His 2012 work Untitled consists of fish skin and straw, both dried out by the sun. Hanging on a wall, they evoke a potential upcoming transformation in muted and ascetic tones. Through a great economy of means, the work serves as a laconic reflection on the notion of resilience.

Valerie Snobeck

Date and place of birth: 1980, Wadena, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Drawing on political, economic, and aesthetic concerns, Valerie Snobeck’s work functions through the accumulation, layering, and fusion of natural and artificial materials. To deal with environmental or social issues, her works combine elements from different environments and eras, such as plastic, tar, burlap, denim, glassware, old images, and inkjet prints. In her work, which ranges from photography and sculpture to video, her complex and multifaceted process is as important as the finished product.

Valerie Snobeck was born in 1980 in Wadena, and lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Cloud State University in St. Cloud and her MFA from the University of Chicago.

Made up of various images and materials, this work by Valerie Snobeck is organized in layers that reveal themselves one after the other. The flower photograph is from the Documerica project commissioned by the US Environmental Protection Agency and published in 1957 in the book The Scallop: Studies of a Shell and its Influences on Humankind by Eight Authors. The image is reproduced on plastic film with the film peeled off the backing. The artist then affixed it to a mirror from which the metals were removed by means of acids, scraping, incisions, and rubbing. She coloured the wooden frame with a permanent black marker, then covered these elements with protective netting recovered from a construction site. Drawn from various sources, the materials, whether natural or artificial, ephemeral or durable, are each deconstructed in turn. The creative process is revealed in all its opacity and translucence. Valerie Snobeck thus endeavours to “depict in order to paint”: she uses images of nature exploited by the Shell Oil company, integrates waste and multiple shimmering effects in a clever play of references between ecology and economy.

Franny Tachon

Title His Flower (Belly)

Valerie Snobeck

Title Go Soft

Date 2014

Materials Video

Dimensions 1 hour 38 seconds

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016 POP UP Truck, Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 04 Jun. 2016

In April 2014, during a production residency at Lafayette Anticipations, Valerie Snobeck made the video Go Soft, dedicated to the so-called “skeleton” watch produced by the Shell company from 1940 on. In this film, the American artist, who had already worked on this oil company, follows the meticulous repair of the movement of this small object for over an hour and a half. The camera focuses on the hands of the master watchmaker as he removes each of the parts of the mechanism before reassembling them one by one. The word “SHELL” on one of the dismantled gears are a reminder that the watch was originally lubricated with motor oil for advertising and promotional purposes. By focusing on this detail, the artist highlights the economic imperialism practiced by the Shell group. At the junction of political, ecological, and aesthetic concerns, Valerie Snobeck’s work summons up the current need for reparation on both a climatic and human level.

Work produced with the support of Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in 2014.

Franny Tachon

Meredyth Sparks

Date and place of birth: 1972, Panama City, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Meredyth Sparks makes collages from photographs with familiar imagery related to pop and rock music icons of the 1970s and 1980s. Her work combines portraits of famous musicians with recycled materials: aluminium, vinyl, or glitter are all embellishments that she uses to modify the symbolic content of the images and recast them. By blurring the line between figuration and abstraction, the artist gives priority to the formal structure of the work over the identification of the subjects, thus coming closer to the creative process of the Russian constructivists of the early twentieth century.

Born in 1972 in Panama City, Florida, Meredyth Sparks holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Title Untitled (Sonic Youth I), from the series We’re treating each other just like strangers

Date 2005

Materials Glitter, aluminium

Dimensions 32 × 44.5 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions We’re treating each other just like strangers, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris from 05 Dec. 2006 to 25 Jan. 2007

Antidote 2, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 27 Oct. to 09 Dec. 2006

Obsessed with the imagery of pop and rock music icons of the 1970s and 1980s, Meredyth Sparks appropriates a photograph of the four members of Sonic Youth, a band formed in 1981, in a collage that seeks to blur the line between two antagonistic pictorial tendencies: figuration and abstraction. Pictured from below, the musicians become blurred silhouettes trapped in an overblown environment: glued glitter and aluminium strips saturate an image that has been scanned and retouched until it becomes illegible. The represented subject thus disappears behind the formal structure of the work, its symbolic content altered by the transgression. For its graphic treatment as much as for the ideas it conveys, Meredyth Sparks’s collage can be compared to the Russian constructivist paintings of the early twentieth century.

Elea Dargelos

Cally Spooner

Date and place of birth: 1983, Ascot, United Kingdom Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

Born in Ascot in 1983, Cally Spooner lives and works between London and Turin. Trained as a philosopher, her work is firmly rooted in the discipline of writing, which she transcribes into a visual and vocal vocabulary. Her practice unfolds in the form of performances, then takes the form of films, sounds, sculptures, drawings, or scores. The words she activates, embodied by the body and verbalisation, are an invitation to action addressed to the static spectator. Her performances incorporate duration and repetition as acts of resistance to the corporate, digital, and performative climates in which it is difficult to distinguish between what is alive and what is dead.

Title And You Were Wonderful, On Stage Date 2013–15

Materials Video

Dimensions 46 minutes

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Cally Spooner – And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, Tate Britain, London from 16 Jan. to 24 Apr. 2016

The video installation And You Were Wonderful, On Stage is the culmination of the performance of the same name presented at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Performa 13 in New York in 2013, and at the Tate Modern in 2014. The live performance was inspired by situations where the performers’ bodies had been dehumanised. Beyoncé lip-synching at President Obama’s inauguration for fear of failing, Justin Bieber’s manager presenting tricks for maximising the young singer’s results, or cyclist Lance Armstrong’s largely staged confession on Oprah Winfrey’s programme to win the public over are some of the examples used by the artist. In each situation, the focus was on “technicity”, in the words of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler. Conversely, sung a cappella by a choir of young girls, Cally Spooner’s performance re-inscribed human fragility and the possibility of the flaw at the centre of the artist’s project.

As part of the Lafayette Anticipations programme, And You Were Wonderful, On Stage benefited from a working residency in December 2013 within the foundation’s rue du Plâtre building to develop the piece’s choreographic elements.

The video installation shows the final performance filmed on a professional film set. Shot simultaneously by six cameras, the video is recomposed and broken up across the space on five screens that surround the visitor. Catchy songs based on advertising agency speak are interspersed over the 46 minutes of the piece. Cameras continuously move through this collective workspace, while the mistakes and hesitations of the singers and dancers, as well as the typically off-screen work of the technical team, are on show, and even central to the piece. The filmic apparatus is laid bare and the “ecology” of filmmaking is embraced in its entirety.

Elea Dargelos

Cally Spooner

Title On False Tears and Outsourcing - musicians respond to emails and manufacture a pop song, just in time, daily (The No. 1 Hit)

Date 2016

Materials Pop song (Nah Nah Nah), legal contract

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

In On False Tears and Outsourcing - musicians respond to emails and manufacture a pop song, just in time, daily (The No. 1 Hit), Cally Spooner presents a new chapter in her On False Tears and Outsourcing project, in which she examines how strategies to maximise productivity and profit by outsourcing activities to the global market have been applied, at the microeconomic level, to human relations in companies. In Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, the artist becomes a music producer and, with the help of Lafayette Anticipations, brings together a group of professional musicians and singers to help to create a hit song. She set out to demonstrate that there is a clear distinction between the writing and production of a song (usually by music production factories), and its embodiment by musicians (sometimes only through lip-syncing), whose role is to embody the image of a product. To do this, she set up a writing process to explore this power dynamic between the two entities. Every morning, she emailed instructions for the musicians to work on during the day, then once the song was recorded, she and Peter Joslyn directed its post-production. Each of the participants in this project is then bound by a contract, which clearly establishes the distribution of the intellectual property of the object produced, which then becomes an integral part of the work.

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Date and place of birth: 1977, Barcelona, Spain

Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s work is characterised by its use of the full range of techniques and scales, from drawing to film, sculpture, installation, and intervention in the landscape. The artist’s practice is marked by the observation of natural phenomena, perception, and the approach to different conceptions of life. His creations question our relationship with the environment and invite the viewer to exercise an awareness that engages them physically, in a projection or displacement, which can sometimes induce a dynamic relationship of mutual transformation with the work.

Title Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name)

Date 2015

Materials Virtual reality, Oculus Rift, Unity 3D forest scan

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Fata Morgana, Jeu de Paume, Paris from 15 Mar. to 22 May 2022

La mesure du monde, MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan from 23 Nov. 2019 to 24 May 2020

Paradigme de la visibilité, Théâtre de Privas, Privas from 10 Feb. to 07 Apr. 2018

At first glance, there is little to see. A visitor wearing a vertically suspended Oculus Rift headset circles blindly, seemingly observing a virtual world arranged for their sole attention. When our turn comes, we put the Oculus on our head, and a jagged landscape of virgin forest opens up to our gaze, limitless, immeasurable. Each twig, each leaf, each shrub is rendered in white stereoscopic dots on a black background, a spatialized cartography of the infinite diversity of a world where nature alone defines its laws and has installed age-old balances. The technical device follows our steps. When we look up, we find ourselves in the centre of a tree, whose ramifications can be seen from the inside. Our viewer’s body passes through the place and disappears, like a pure spirit, a consciousness capable of perceiving everything about the magnificently complex structures of the ecosystem without giving us the power to modify them. The Catalan-born Brazilian artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané has carried out a high-precision 3D scan of almost 1,000 square metres in the heart of the primeval Mata Atlântica forest in southwestern Brazil. For those who allow themselves to be caught up in this dizzying contemplation, his installation Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts in my name) is above all an experience of self-consciousness, of a realm where all the surrounding living matter merges like a gigantic network of invisible energies.

BIOTOPIA, Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz

from 31 Mar. to 30 Jul. 2017

Brasil, Beleza?!, Museum Beelden aan Zee, Scheveningen from 26 May to 02 Oct. 2016

Pop up 7 - Daniel Steegmann-Mangrané, 44 GL, Paris

from 01 to 31 Dec. 2015

Diamond Stingily

Date and place of birth: 1990, Chicago, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Title Elephant Memory #1

Date 2019

Materials Synthetic hair, galvanized steel chain, galvanized steel hooks

Dimensions 400 × 5 × 5,5 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions C4, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (Liechtenstein) from 20 May to 04 Sep. 2022

from 17 Sep. to 09 Nov. 2019

Off Kedzie, Galerei Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (Allemagne)

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Title Spiral Forest 2

Date 2015

Materials Silver gelatin print

Dimensions 77 × 57 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Following on from Phantom, a virtual world based on a 3D scan of vegetation, and from 16 MM, an intimate, sensorial exploration of the forest through a travelling shot, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané has produced a blackand-white view of the dense foliage of the Mata Atlântica, a virgin forest in south-western Brazil, which provides no escape for the eye. While Phantom explores the texture and immensity of the forest and 16 MM its sensuality, the photograph Spiral Forest 2 suspends this exploration in order to enable the discovery of the depth and luminosity of this ecosystem which is as hostile as it is fragile.

Batia Suter

Date and place of birth: 1967, Bülach, Switzerland Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Batia Suter’s work is based on the creation of monumental installations. In her search for printed reproductions, the artist explores multiple visual documents in order to recover their content. Through an archival practice similar to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, these innumerable images are then edited and assembled. Through this gradual decontextualization, the print becomes a readymade that gives rise to new meanings and reactions, the unprecedented combination of eclectic images giving them untapped expressive possibilities.

Born in 1967 in Bülach, Batia Suter studied at the art academies of Zurich and Arnhem from 1990 to 1995. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

Title Nightshift

Date 2019

Materials Blankets

Dimensions 1,290 × 400 cm

Acquisition date 2019

Exhibitions Des attentions, Le Crédac, Ivry-Sur-Seine from 18 Jan. to 31 Mar. 2019

This impressive installation is made up of a set of 135 illustrated newsprint pages that Batia Suter has compiled, printed, and laid out on the floor interspersed with woolen blankets. The title of the work, Nightshift, is a tribute to her grandfather who was a night worker. The artist invites us to follow her on a tour of discovery of heterogeneous images printed in shades of grey. In the manner of an exquisite corpse, these seemingly disordered assemblages allow her to empty the image of its initial substance and to propose a new intuitive reading. By abandoning its original use, the decontextualized image acquires a different meaning through its new associations. Faced with this opaque alchemy, the viewer’s attention is disrupted and heightened in order to decipher the possibility of a meaning. Through its formal and thematic analogies, Suter’s visual archipelago questions the contemporary value of the image and its illustrative power.

Quentin Rose

Pol Taburet

Date and place of birth: 1997, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France Title Ô...Trees Date 2023

Exhibitions ZOO "The Day of Heaven and Hell", Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris (France), from 21 Jun. to 03 Sep. 2023

Pol Taburet

Title Ô...Trees

Date 2023

Materials Polyester resin, fiberglass

Dimensions 140 × 20.7 × 24.6 cm

Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions ZOO "The Day of Heaven and Hell", Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris (France), from 21 Jun. to 03 Sep. 2023

SoiL Thornton

Date and place of birth: 1990, Macon, United States Lives and works in New York, United States

Title Slave > salve

Date 2023

Materials Aloe vera gel, burned wood panel

Dimensions 152.08 × 121.92 × 4 cm Acquisition date 2023

Exhibitions Painting, the shorter of the longest, Maxwell Graham Gallery, New-York (United States), du 13 janv. au 25 févr. 2023

Sung Tieu

Date and place of birth: 1987, Hai Duong, Vietnam

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Sung Tieu’s work reflects her focus on the notion of hegemony and its cultural representations. Through her photographs, sculptures, and installations, she explores the way we react to images, revealing that these reactions, dictated by our cultural referents, are the result of lived experiences or passively integrated facts.

Born in 1987 in Hai Duong (Vietnam), Sung Tieu grew up in Germany, where she now lives and works.

Title No #1 Classic (After Roe Ethridge)

Date 2014

Materials Glossy photo paper

Dimensions 42 × 29.7 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Sung Tieu’s trompe-l’oeil photographs use contemporary avatars of luxury as their lures. Here, a perfume called No #1 Classic (After Roe Ethridge) resembles the iconic Chanel fragrance, but everything in this shot is fake. The counterfeit perfume and the style, not the artist’s own, are responses to the homogeneity of taste. The style is inappropriate, but not neutral, for Sung Tieu borrows from Wolfgang Tillmans’s preferred themes—photographs of raw values such as the gold bars of the Gold series or gleaming car bodies make up a sociolect (a variety of a language specific to a social group) that one would like to articulate. In this vein, Sung Tieu has produced several photographs that question the relationship between display and regimes of truth: through their ubiquitous presence in public space and on the widest variety of media, do advertising objects appear as good, fair, and true?

Sung Tieu

Title 5th Century (After Wolfgang Tillmans)

Date 2014

Materials Glossy photo paper

Dimensions 42 × 29.7 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Sung Tieu’s trompe-l’oeil photographs use contemporary avatars of luxury as their lures. Here, a perfume called 5th Century resembles the iconic Chanel fragrance, but everything in this shot is fake. The counterfeit perfume and the style, not the artist’s own, are responses to the homogeneity of taste. The style is inappropriate, but not neutral, for Sung Tieu borrows from Wolfgang Tillmans’s preferred themes—photographs of raw values such as the gold bars of the Gold series or gleaming car bodies make up a sociolect (a variety of a language specific to a social group) that one would like to articulate. In this vein, Sung Tieu has produced several photographs that question the relationship between display and regimes of truth: through their ubiquitous presence in public space and on the widest variety of media, do advertising objects appear as good, fair, and true?

Niels Trannois

Date and place of birth: 1976, Flers, France Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Niels Trannois’ work layers matter in a process that creates paintings which become close to sculpture. He develops twilight scenes between abstraction and figuration by combining cuts, collages, and juxtapositions. His evocative titles induce a discrepancy with his representations which recall the language games dear to the surrealists, contributing to the creation of an atmosphere of mystery that confronts the viewer.

Born in 1976 in Flers, Niels Trannois studied at the École supérieure des arts appliqués Duperré in Paris, then at the Villa Arson in Nice. He lives and works in Berlin.

Title Au-delà du flash, te fouiller (l’éclisse)

Date 2009–10

Materials Wooden box, marouflaged canvas

Dimensions 65 × 80 × 5.2 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 7, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 06 Oct. 2011 to 07 Jan. 2012

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

In a bare, twilit composition, a black eye seems to be watching the viewer. It is accompanied by an abstract motif cut out of the canvas. The enigmatic work is reminiscent of surrealist creations that juxtapose heterogeneous elements. The title, Au-delà du flash, te fouiller (l’éclisse), induces a poetic shift between the text and the image. The artist thus relies on the contrasts between language and the sensation produced by the work, abstraction and narration, representation and emotion. Niels Trannois’ artistic practice goes beyond painting to make the artistic process visible and to inhabit the surrounding world, just like this eye staring at its surroundings.

Valentine Brégeon

Niels Trannois

Title I will give you a name

Date 2009

Materials Wood, oil paint, marouflaged canvas

Dimensions 86 × 78.5 × 5 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Title Vesperal requiem for Clairwill

Date 2010

Materials Marouflaged canvas, wooden box, oiled photocopy

Dimensions 87 × 69 × 3 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

From an abstract composition which simply highlights the raw grain of the supporting wood, Niels Trannois brings out faintly sketched anthropomorphic limbs and an accumulation of tangled dark lines. He induces a discrepancy between the abstract representation and the title I will give you a name, which reduces the creative act to “giving a name” to one’s production. The artist delivers an enigmatic creation that introduces textural effects through the use of various materials. He plays with the contrasts between language and the sensation produced by the work, abstraction and narration, representation and emotion in a painting that is also evocative of the surrealists.

Valentine Brégeon

The title, Vesperal requiem for Clairwill, is a reference to the libertine lover in the novel Juliette (1797) by the Marquis de Sade. It creates a discrepancy between the literary title and the resolutely abstract image. Only a light canvas cut-out interrupts the monochrome nature of the black oiled photocopy. Niels Trannois delivers an enigmatic creation that introduces material effects through the irregularity of the chosen medium. He plays on the contrasts between language and the sensation produced by the work, abstraction and narration, representation and emotion. His practice is deployed on a wide variety of media to achieve a result that is almost sculptural in nature, as he plays with the addition or removal of matter and the diversity of materials.

Valentine Brégeon

Alvaro Urbano

Date and place of birth: 1983, Madrid, Spain Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Alvaro Urbano’s polymorphous work (photo, installation, sculpture) draws on the concept of heterotopia defined by Michel Foucault in 1967. He is interested in the notion of space as well as its possible temporal, physical, or visual definitions. Since 2014, he has frequently collaborated with the artist Petrit Halilaj.

Born in Madrid in 1983, Alvaro Urbano studied at the School of Architecture in Madrid before joining the Institut für Raumexperimente at the Berlin University of the Arts. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

Ever Since Night Falls is an installation that features different sculptures reinterpreting lost, forgotten, or destroyed works. Alvaro Urbano disregards the situations and motivations that led to the disappearance of these works. They have come back to life, but are nevertheless removed from the context of their respective eras. The artist creates a utopian collection by fictitiously creating a contemporary reflection of forgotten artefacts. Ever Since Night Falls takes up the motif of the danse macabre, a typology developed in the late Middle Ages. It is a round dance that illustrates social equality in the face of death: the different social classes are represented as being led towards Death by skeletons. The artist revives the memory of the fresco on this theme painted by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch on the wall of a Bern cemetery in the sixteenth century.

Léonie Maton

Title Ever Since Night Falls (Berner Totentanz [Bern Dance of death], Niklaus Manuel Dutsch, 1520)

Éric Van de Walle

Date and place of birth: 1963, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Éric Van de Walle’s interdisciplinary practice combines various forms, from design to sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts. His uniquely pared-down installations are conceived from a “radicality”, a “minimum”, and governed by a principle of “elementarity”, to use the artist’s own words. They respond to functions of use and convenience, although given their appearance, their identification and meaning are not immediately apparent.

Éric Van de Walle was born in France in 1963 where he studied to become a designer. He studied audiovisual design at the University of Metz before graduating from the École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine. He lives and works in Paris.

Title Le déguisement

Date 2014

Materials Mixed media

Dimensions

Acquisition date 2014

Exhibitions Venir Voir Venir, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 03 to 06 Jul. 2014

At first glance, the installation Le déguisement evokes a simplicity of form and materials, but in this work which is more complex than it appears, Éric Van de Walle has sought a balance in a deconstructed form. He produced this work between January and June 2014 as part of a residency at Lafayette Anticipations, prior to its opening to the public. This experience allowed him to evolve his practice as a designer and his conception of the object towards a more visual, artistic approach. Using raw materials recovered on site, he created an installation whose elements are reminiscent of those of a dressing table, a practical piece of furniture intended for grooming, without explicitly claiming to be so.

Elea Dargelos

Jean-Luc Verna

Date and place of birth: 1966, Nice, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Although he considers drawing to be the “spine” of his work, JeanLuc Verna defines himself as “polydisciplinary” insofar as he also practices performance, dance, singing, theatre, film, photography, and sculpture. It is through all these mediums that he stages his body, which is completely tattooed and pierced, in numerous self-portraits. He presents himself as glorious or miserable, elated or suffering. His work draws on both scholarly and popular culture, Greek mythology, Christian iconography, and the pop rock pantheon. “I put Sleeping Beauty and the Bible on the same level in the category of fairy tales,” he says, in reference to his mixing of genres.

Title Mieux qu’à Naples

Date 1998

Materials Veil, pencils, makeup, nails, wooden box, Plexiglas

Dimensions 92 × 59 cm (veil) 126 × 92.5 × 15.5 cm (nails, wooden box, Plexiglas)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions Objet de tendresse, Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris from 05 to 17 Apr. 2018

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Vous n’êtes pas un peu beaucoup maquillé ? - Non, Espace d’arts plastiques de Vénissieux, Vénissieux from 28 May to 13 Jul. 2005

“It’s my own Holy Shroud, my own lie!” says Jean-Luc Verna of his series of transfers on fabric. In these works, the drawing is photocopied and then transferred onto a veil with the help of make-up before it is fixed to the wall with large folds. The ambiguity of Mieux qu’à Naples lies in the interplay between the prosaic nature of the subject and the spiritual symbolism of the medium. The scene depicts a satyr, a lustful and perverse mythological figure known for his drunkenness. While contemplating a mask representing his own face, the man with goat’s legs and pointed ears copulates with another creature in a relationship of domination and submission. This erotic image, which appears to present the sexual act as a subterfuge, at first sight seems to be at odds with the mystical aspect of the textile, which recalls Saint Veronica’s Veil, which bore the miraculous imprint of Christ’s face. Emblematic of Jean-Luc Verna’s mixture of genres between the sacred and the profane, Mieux qu’à Naples is a complex layering of symbols and diverse references.

Franny Tachon

Jean-Luc Verna

Title Le colibri d’Afrique

Date 1998

Materials Veil, pencils, makeup, nails, wooden box, Plexiglas

Dimensions 102 × 83 cm (veil) 176 × 116 × 15.5 cm (nails, wooden box, Plexiglas)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Vous n’êtes pas un peu beaucoup maquillé ? - Non, Espace d’arts plastiques de Vénissieux, Vénissieux from 28 May to 13 Jul. 2005

Title APPOLO

Date 1998

Materials Veil, pencils, makeup, nails, wooden box, Plexiglas

Dimensions 74 × 38 cm (veil) 108 × 71.5 × 15.5 cm (nails, wooden box, Plexiglas)

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 1, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 01 to 29 Oct. 2005

Vous n’êtes pas un peu beaucoup maquillé ? - Non, Espace d’arts plastiques de Vénissieux, Vénissieux

from 28 May to 13 Jul. 2005

Le colibri d’Afrique is created by a transfer onto a veil and cardboard enhanced with pencil and make-up. In addition, Jean-Luc Verna uses iron nails, a wooden box, and Plexiglas to create this apparition of a hummingbird placed in a hand that he has hung on a wall like a Holy Face. Le colibri d’Afrique is reminiscent of the saints Agathe and Véronique, whom the artist transferred onto vintage paper from his drawings. The movement of the pencil and then the transfer onto the cardboard and veil allows the memory to recede in favour of the present. The drawing acts here as a go-between. Jean-Luc Verna makes sophisticated reproductions and displacements: from paper, he moves on to tracing paper and then to a photocopy, where the original drawing is enlarged and its precision degraded. This photocopy is then rubbed with trichloroethylene to be transferred onto a veil, and then reworked with pencil and eye shadow. By placing the viewer in the space between reality and its representation, Jean-Luc Verna demonstrates a desire to master appearances while imbuing a reference to the sacred, thus creating a mise en abyme of his own world.

Manon Prévost-Van Dooren

“It’s my own Holy Shroud, my own lie!” says Jean-Luc Verna of his series of transfers on fabric. By making a drawing that he photocopies and transfers with make-up onto a cloth that he then attaches to the wall with large folds, the visual artist asserts the highly spiritual nature of his work. The veil echoes that of Saint Veronica, which bears the miraculous imprint of Christ’s face, but JeanLuc Verna’s work, which he defines as a “kind of strong irreverence to all these religious things,” evades biblical symbolism. There is no religious iconography here: it is to Greco-Roman mythology that the artist refers. Drawn in grisaille on a human scale like a figure drawing, the male nude represents Apollo, as the title suggests. While he usually inspires poets, here the sun god turns his back on us, ready to leave the scene. The draping of the veil, evocative of a theatre curtain, and the make-up used for the colour reinforce the sense of the artifice of representation.

Franny Tachon

Raphaela Vogel

Date and place of birth: 1988, Nuremberg, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Raphaela Vogel is a multidisciplinary artist whose work creates a dialogue between sculpture, video, and installation. Inspired by nature and literature, she brings about an obscure and enigmatic world evoking myths and rituals that challenge the viewer’s imagination. Through her ambitious compositions which play with contrasts in scale, she questions human subjectivity with humour.

Born in 1988 in Nuremberg, Raphaela Vogel studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 2009 to 2012, then at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 2011 to 2014. Following a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2014 to 2016, she moved to Berlin, where she teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe.

Title I Smell a Massacre

Date 2016

Materials Steel tubes, pipe fittings, polyurethane, elastomer, video projector, speakers, subwoofer, hookah pipe, powder puff

Dimensions 6 minutes 5 seconds (video)

Acquisition date 2017

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Combining sculpture and video, Raphaela Vogel’s composite installations stand at the crossroads of mythology, science fiction, feminist theory, animism, punk, and diverse universes that she jumbles in a seemingly anarchist but nevertheless surprisingly controlled way. I Smell a Massacre places the vision of a herd of sheep filmed by a drone side by side with selfportraits of the artist and a sculpture that resembles a huge carcass. Consisting of tubes, pipes, a hookah, and a band of tassels from an old piece of furniture, the whole is set to the sound of bass. At once director, sound engineer, light technician, and leading actress of her films, Raphaela Vogel spins a web of symbols that questions our relationship to violence but also to the animal world, with the leitmotif of birds, which happens to be the meaning of the artist’s name in German.

Erika Vogt

Date and place of birth: 1973, East Newark, United States Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States

Erika Vogt has focused her work on the production, transformation, and process of image making. She explores the changeability and dynamism of the image by using several different mediums simultaneously. While her artistic practice was initially based on experimental film, she quickly integrated sculpture, drawing, and photography in installations such as Speech Mesh - Drawn OFF (2014). Images are combined and superimposed, creating new forms whose unstable and shifting meaning is constantly transformed by the artist’s associations.

Born in 1973 in East Newark, New Jersey, Erika Vogt is a graduate of New York University and the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MoMA in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Title Speech Mesh

Date 2014

Materials Clothes rail

Dimensions 3 minutes 27 seconds

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Speech Mesh-Drawn OFF, Centre d’art contemporain Triangle France –Astérides, Marseille from 08 Mar. to 07 May 2014

Speech Mesh-Drawn OFF, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield from 14 Feb. to 06 Apr. 2014

On a screen held up by a clothes rail, a network of language undulates in glowing red. In the video installation Speech Mesh, Erika Vogt orchestrates the encounter of elementary forms with the conventions of commercial presentation. She has combined the codified language of display devices with simple forms, common factors in creation throughout the ages. “This cosmic breathing that informs the fabric of creation is something everyone can witness. Observing the moon, the evolution of its crescent, observing the tides, the cycles of the seasons or of our lives”: this is how Jean de Loisy characterises the origin of these recurring forms that run through the history of art and human production (Simple Forms, exhibition catalogue, p. 20). In Erika Vogt’s work, there is a definite concern with capturing the lowest common denominator of culture “in the wild”. Through the density of meaning of her archetypal forms and their media, the artist also questions the efficiency and singularity of symbols at the intersection of the worlds of commerce and information.

Erika Vogt

Title Benny

Date 2015

Materials

Urethane resin, dust, wood pieces, acrylic paint, metal rail, rope, leaves, pebbles, salvaged materials

Dimensions 185.4 × 160 × 55.9 cm

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020 Slug, Simone Subal Gallery, New York from 10 May to 14 Jun. 2015

Title Bell Part 121516

Date 2016

Materials Watercolour paper, ink

Dimensions 427 × 112 cm

Acquisition date 2016

Exhibitions Répétition, Fondation Villa Empain, Brussels from 13 May to 21 Aug. 2016

Initially known for her work in video and experimental cinema, Erika Vogt has mastered other media to pursue a social approach to art. For several years now, she has focused on sculpture, which allows her to reunite artworks with their audiences in the same dimension. Benny is an integral part of this artistic renewal while bearing witness to a kinetic continuity with her previous works. Framed by the bars of a clothing rack, this two-sided sculpture is shiny on one side and matte and textured on the other, the latter made up of different residual materials. In its workmanship, size, and cut-outs the size of a hand, Benny is of a human scale, recalling the objects of Lygia Clark—an artist who wished to see her oeuvre manipulated by other hands and bodies than her own.

Répétition, Fondation Villa Empain, Brussels from 13 May to 21 Aug. 2016

Bell Part 121516 is a tripartite composition that presents different views of a clock pendulum. The work merges photography and drawing in an inkjet-printed image on watercolour paper. The isolated pendulum photographed by Erika Vogt is transformed by the lines and spots of paint that cover it. Repeated and distorted by the artist, the motif decomposes over the course of the images, eventually melting and disappearing completely in a magma of purple paint. By exploring the mutability of the image through a protean practice, Erika Vogt makes the process of creation the very subject of her works. In Bell Part 121516, she makes visible the progressive covering of the initial image, transfigured by the fusion of different mediums. While the title identifies the object, the meaning and significance of the work remain unstable, shifting and open to interpretation.

Suzana

Danilovic

Ulla von Brandenburg

Date and place of birth: 1974, Karlsruhe, Germany

Lives and works in Paris, France

The work of Ulla von Brandenburg employs theatre and stage design through a variety of media. Her imagination is inspired by the aesthetics of fin-de-siècle Europe where occultism, literature, imagery, and psychoanalysis were intertwined. In light of these past resurgences, the artist approaches the present through skilful and polymorphic stagings.

Born in 1974 in Karlsruhe, Ulla von Brandenburg studied scenography in her native city and visual arts in Hamburg before receiving the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2016. She is represented by the galleries Art:Concept (Paris), Produzentengalerie (Hamburg), Meyer Riegger (Karlsruhe), and Pilar Corrias (London). She lives and works in Paris.

Title Forest III

Date 2009

Materials Wood

Dimensions

400 × 500 × 280 cm

Acquisition date 2013

Exhibitions

Antidote 6, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris from 14 Oct. 2010 to 08 Jan. 2011

Name or Number: Ulla von Brandenburg

Le Plateau FRAC Île-de-France, Paris, from 19 Mar. to 17 May 2009

Forest III invites the visitor to enter a circular wooden construction delimited by the presence of an entrance and an exit. Beyond the wooden decor left bare, the viewer then discovers black stencilled murals. The theatrical staging envelops the viewer in a mysterious and anxious halo populated by tree silhouettes inherited from the imagery of the tale. By depicting this dark forest in the manner of a Rorschach test, Ulla von Brandenburg makes use of the codes of psychology and psychoanalysis to invite us to symbolically explore the unconscious. In doing so, the viewer becomes a participant in the work. Through this scenographic illusion, Ulla von Brandenburg instigates an interpretation in the viewer to better reveal the mechanisms of their personality and question their relationship to the world of today.

Quentin Rose

Ulla von Brandenburg

Title Baisse-toi Montagne, Lève-toi Vallon

Date 2015

Materials Fabrics, objects

Dimensions Variable dimensions

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions Performa 15, New York from 01 to 22 Nov. 2015

Title Baisse-toi Montagne, Lève-toi Vallon

Date 2015

Materials Video

Dimensions 18 minutes

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions

Baisse-toi Montagne, Lève-toi Vallon is a largescale theatrical performance produced by Lafayette Anticipations and presented for the first time at the Kaaitheater in Brussels. The play for five actors and a choir is based on the dressing up rituals, events, and symbols connected to Saint-Simonianism (dressing the Father, choreography of gestures, hierarchy of songs, lesson in elementary astronomy, manipulation of objects) treated as so many fragments that recall the memory and values of a movement whose communitarian and even sectarian failings were clearly problematic. The performance, carried out in a streamlined floor to ceiling decor, sung to recall the modes of transmission, was the subject of a film presented as part of Performa 15, accompanied by an installation specially designed by the artist for the occasion.

As a follow-up to her performance Baisse-toi Montagne, Lève-toi Vallon, which was performed in several cities around the world, Ulla von Brandenburg produced a film and installation of the same name. On the occasion of the performance in Riga, the artist made a black-and-white film of this play for five actors and a choir about SaintSimonianism and its social and political projects. For Performa 2015, she projected this film and produced new colour elements for the set (using the chromatic palette of the film’s set, made invisible by the use of blackand-white) that complement the costumes and objects already created for the performance. Finally, in addition to the frontal aesthetic of the play and associated film, she imagined an installation offering a total immersion in the positivist utopia that was Saint-Simonianism. In Ulla von Brandenburg’s film work, the use of black-and-white represents a form of timelessness. Baisse-toi Montagne, Lève-toi Vallon thus exposes, through different media, the memory of this progressive eighteenth-century movement, which is little known to the public. The work, enriched by the plurality of its forms and songs, rereads, revives, and recalls the values of this movement but also its shortcomings, highlighting the question of the political ideal.

Anicka Yi

Date and place of birth: 1971, Seoul, Korea

Lives and works in New York, United States

Anicka Yi focuses on perishable substances, and her favourite materials —as varied as potato crisps, fur, bodily fluids, and bacteria—are diverted into installations, sculptures, and films. The artist searches for the limits of the persistence of beauty. Often immersed in glycerine, resin, or wax, Anicka Yi’s sensory creations bear witness to her interest in highly evocative chemical and techno-sensual experiments. While seeking to break away from the dominance of the visual, Anicka Yi is interested in how the senses and perception are culturally conditioned, referring to a “biopolitics of the senses”.

Born in 1971 in Seoul (South Korea), Anicka Yi was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Prize in 2011. She lives and works in New York.

Title The Last Diamond Date 2015

Materials Dryer doors, diffuser, perfume

Dimensions 65 × 65 × 50 cm (boxes)

Acquisition date 2015

Exhibitions You, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris from 11 Oct. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020

Faisons de l’inconnu un allié, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris from 11 to 23 Oct. 2016

7,070,430K of Digital Spit, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel from 12 Jun. to 16 Aug. 2015

Deep-fried flowers, expired powdered milk, snail mucus and the scent of forgetting: Anicka Yi’s oeuvre reveals her predilection for the fleeting and the perishable. After developing a fragrance related to memory loss with the perfume designer Barnabé Fillion, Anicka Yi applied it to the pages of her first monograph. Her research into the olfactive transcription of memory loss then took form in The Last Diamond. Two aromas emanate from the two partially-open dryer doors that make up the installation. Through this intermingling of scents, the artist wishes to create an alchemy that smells of amnesia. The Last Diamond bears witness to the artist interest in experiments that are at once chemical and techno-sensual, with a heightened psychological value.

The Collection in numbers

The Collection includes 385 works by 208 artists.

112

95 1

men women genderneutral

7 78 81 47 unspecified France Europe rest of the world

Since 2020, 30 new artists have been represented in the Collection, including:

8 21 1

men women nonbinary artist

Borrowing institutions in 2023:

École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, « En réserve », du 9 janvier au 8 février 2023

Langley Park, Perth, du 3 mars au 12 mars 2023

Tokyo Garden Theater, Tokyo, du 28 mars au 31 mars 2023

The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, « Nido », du 30 mars au 18 juin 2023.

CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, Musées des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, Angers

Le Grand Café - Centre d’art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire

KRONE COURONNE, Bienne, « The Gleaners », du 9 juin au 29 juillet 2023

LAAC lieu d’Art et Action Contemporaine, Dunkerque, Triennale Art & Industrie « Chaleur humaine »

Les Franciscaines, Deauville Centrale Fies, Dro Altice Arena, Lisbonne Museion, Bolzano

Momu Modemuseum Provincie Antwerpen, Anvers CRAC Alsace, Altkirch

Catalogue 2024 · The Moulin Family Endowment Fund Collection

The Moulin Family Endowment Fund Collection

The Moulin Family Endowment Fund

Collection

Table of contents

Nick Ackerman

Date and place of birth: 1976, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States

Lives and works in New York, United States

Saâdane Afif

Date and place of birth: 1970, Vendôme, France Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Saâdane Afif

Saâdane Afif

Saâdane Afif

Saâdane Afif

Saâdane Afif

Saâdane Afif

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Date and

Tbilisi, Georgia Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Dove Allouche

Date and place of birth: 1972, Sarcelles, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Wilfrid Almendra

Date and place of birth: 1972, Cholet, France

Lives and works between Marseille, France and Casario, Portugal

Wilfrid Almendra

Wilfrid Almendra

Danai Anesiadou

Date and place of birth: 1977, Germany

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Matthew Angelo Harrison

Date and place of birth: 1989, Detroit, United States Lives and works in Detroit, United States

Meris Angioletti

Date and place of birth: 1977, Bergamo, Italy

Lives and works in Paris, France

Xavier Antin

Date and place of birth: 1981, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Salvatore Arancio

Date and place of birth: 1974, Catania, Italy

Lives and works in London, England

Salvatore Arancio

Salvatore Arancio

Pierre Ardouvin

Date and place of birth: 1955, Crest, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Pierre Ardouvin

Pierre Ardouvin

Pierre Ardouvin

Pierre Ardouvin

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud

Date and place of birth: 1972, Lyon, France

Lives and works in Lyon, France

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud

Lutz Bacher

1943–2019

Lives and works in New York, United States

Olga Balema

Date and place of birth: 1984, Lviv, Ukraine

Lives and works in New York, United States

Olga Balema

Davide Balula

Lives

United States

Davide Balula

Davide Balula

Éric Baudart

Date and place of birth: 1972, Saint-Cloud, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Éric Baudart

Éric Baudelaire

Date and

1973, Salt Lake City, United States Lives and works in Paris, France

Lucy Beech

Date and place of birth: 1985, Hull, United Kingdom Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Will Benedict

Date and place of birth: 1978, Los Angeles, United States Lives and works in Paris, France

Hélène Bertin

Date and place of birth: 1989, Luberon, France

Lives and works in Paris and Cucuron, France