The Franco-Swiss artist Agnès Thurnauer presents La Traverser, her first solo exhibition at Galerie Michel Rein, Paris, to see from 29 October to 19 December 2020.

This solo show brings together, paintings and sculptures from five different series, Big-Big et Bang-Bang, Prédelles, Peintures d’histoires, Portraits Grandeur Nature and Matrices/Assises.

Born in Paris en 1962, Agnès Thurnauer lives in Paris and works just outside in Ivry-sur-Seine. Through her works, the artist deals with the question of language and time, often rooted in the history of art. We find in his artistic practice the omnipresence of writing, literally and figuratively, inviting the viewer to wander through language.

Through her works, the artist deals with the question of language and time, often rooted in the history of art. We find in her artistic practice the omnipresence of writing, literally and figuratively, inviting the viewer to wander through language.

Agnès Thurnauer reaffirms here her status as an artist-painter, for whom "the language of painting has always been a relationship between body and mind and vice versa" and thus reveals three pictorial series.

The Big-Big and Bang-Bang paintings, initiated in 1995, run through the whole of Agnès Thurnauer's work, like primordial abstract forms. The artist represents anthropomorphic, non-generated figures, leaving the question of identity open.

The exhibition also presents the Prédelles series. A word cut into syllables and placed at the top of a diptych, like a crossing from one canvas to another, offering visitors a gradual increase in visual tension through language. The third pictorial series presented, Créolisations Internes, comes from the story Paintings, developed in 2005. Agnès Thurnauer first paints the text as a grid, then a figure takes shape between the letters.

 

The artist exhibits three life-size Portraits, feminising the names of three "migrants" of the art history genre, Eugénie Delacroix, Claude Cahun and Roberte Mapplethorpe. They pose the question of the representation of gender, particularly feminine, in art history. Beyond a political and feminist gesture, Agnès Thurnauer offers here a body of work that has made an impact, notably in 2009 at the Centre Pompidou during the exhibition @elles.

At the center of the space, Michel Rein honors his exhibition with Agnès Thurnauer's sculptural series, the Matrices, functional seating implementing language "as potentiality and space of opening". They are made up of moulds of letters whose different elements form a space within when wandered around produces a new reading. The artist presents here a unique piece never before shown to the public, a bronze genome represented by the letters XXY, Klinefelter's syndrome.

In parallel with her exhibition at Galerie Michel Rein, the artist Agnès Thurnauer will have a busy October 2020 with the addition of a work from the Matrices series at the Musée de l'Orangerie, accompanied by the installation of a public commission of twenty Matrices in bronze in Ivry-sur-Seine.

 

 

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