The Franco-Swiss artist Agnès Thurnauer presents Rrose c'est la life, a solo exhibition at the Centre d'art Contemporain Bouvet Ladubay, Saumur, from 3 July to 3 October, 2021.

This solo show presents a set of works, paintings and sculptures, from five series, Mapping the studio, History Paintings, Life Size Portraits, Matrices/ Seats and Predelles.

 

The diversity of the pieces selected, both iconic and more intimate - including previously unseen works - offers a wonderful panorama of Agnès Thurnauer's practice as seen through the prism of the color pink.

 

The exhibition opens with several paintings from the Mapping the Studio series, named after a piece by Bruce Nauman. These pieces evoke the performance at work in the studio. The artist's gestures are inscribed on the geography of the floor and the canvas becomes a map that records these movements.

 

Several important works from the History Paintings series, developed since 2005, will be presented. The very large painting Time (2010), a variation on the figure of the artist at work in his studio, will answer to Execution of the painting (2013), a later work on the same theme opposing the intimate time of the gestation of the painting with the crackling time of the photographers' flashes.

 

Four life-size portraits will punctuate the space. This pictorial series poses the question of the representation of gender, particularly female, in the history of art. Figures not only of the double but of the necessary otherness allowing to reach the completeness of the ideas as of the kinds. Because we are always the other of the other.

 

The sculpture Matrice/Assise (XXY) in bare varnished bronze, figure of an open annunciation, will be installed in echo to the painting Time (2010), in which the letters also appear in reserve. The language is represented as an open space, habitable, and available to different readings. Acting as a seat, they will allow visitors to take the time to contemplate.

 

Several Prédelles will punctuate the course, always comprising a word cut into syllables and”placed at the top of a diptych, like a crossing from one canvas to another, offering visitors a tensioning of the image through language.

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"I have always loved pink. I loved it jubilantly in the paintings of Philip Guston. All Guston's paintings are set against a pink background that is very tender despite the harshness of the subject. I loved the pink in Piero's work, that unheard-of pink shroud that envelops Christ when he leaves the tomb. I liked it in Manet too, stunning in the Lady with a Parrot. I loved it in literature, in Gertrude Stein, with A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Finally in Duchamp, in his feminine double, Rrose Selavy. It is under the aegis of this luminous and augural figure, premise of a feminine 21st century - that is to say plural - that this exhibition opens. May the color pink be as sweet as it is sharp, may the opening posed by the character of Rrose Selavy accompany us with intelligence and facetiousness. Marcelle Duchamp will always precede us.”