Agnès Thurnauer

Agnès Thurnauer with her sculptural installation Matrice / sol

Agnès Thurnauer (born April 28, 1962 in Paris ) is a French contemporary artist. Since the 1990s she has been analyzing the representation and place of women in the media and art. She works mainly with painting , but also with sculpture , typography , drawing and installation .

Life

Agnès Thurnauer grew up as the daughter of a psychoanalyst and an architect in Paris. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs and graduated in 1985 with a degree in film and video art . She then worked as a freelance editor. During this time she had two children. In 1993 she resumed artistic work. Occasionally from 1995, continuously since the beginning of 2000, her works have been exhibited in galleries and museums. She lives in Paris and works in her studio in Ivry-sur-Seine .

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Portraits grandeur nature , Seattle Art Museum , 2012

Olympia # 2 (2012)

From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, Thurnauer painted almost abstractly in clear colors and shapes. At the same time, she questioned the role of photographer and model in her photographic work. In 1998 she began to integrate writing into her art. For Thurnauer, painting is a place of words, of speaking (“Lieu de parole”), not in the sense of the painted or drawn text, but as the materialization of thought. For her, a painting embodies a conversation partner with whom one can have an uninterrupted dialogue.

She became internationally known with a series of large, colored, labeled buttons, the Portraits grandeur nature (life-size portraits) , with which she feminized art history. For example, she transformed the names of Marcel Duchamp into Marcelle Duchamp and Andy Warhol into Annie Warhol. The exception is the button for Louis Bourgeois. It's the masculinized version of Louise Bourgeois . So she commented with humor on the absence of women artists in museums and on the art market and made the presence of women stand out. The series was created in 2005 on the occasion of the Biennale for contemporary art in Lyon and has been hanging as a picture rail in museums such as the Center Pompidou and the Seattle Art Museum since 2008 . The following year, she reproduced the painting The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet and wrote feminized stage names over it. They called it The Original World . With the resumption of old motifs, she offers a re-interpretation and reassessment of history from today's perspective. Reprise is also the name of the series of picture-word compositions in which Thurnauer dealt with paintings by Édouard Manet . In 2013 she was invited by the Yale School of Architecture to contribute to an exhibition celebrating two paintings by Manet from 1863: Olympia and Breakfast in the Green . Thurnauer reproduced the painting of Olympia and covered it with tender words written in golden letters to a woman during the act of love.

Grande Prédelle Rainbow Elbow (2008)

Between 2007 and 2011 Thurnauer created a series of works that she called Prédelle ( Predella ). The Grande Prédelle are diptychs , each of which represents an enlargement of the blue- backed wing (watercolor by Albrecht Dürer , 1512) along a deformation of the iconic title of Elle magazine . The title and the subject convey a multiple play on words with the homonym près d'elle (close to her) and aile (wing).

A sculptural work by Thurnauer is Matrice (Matrix) in several versions. It consists of the 26 letters of the alphabet laid out as an installation on the floor. Each of the three-dimensional objects is broken so that the letter does not result from the volume, but from the cavity. Language is no longer a tool, but becomes an open space through which one can walk. Matrice / assise is made of 45 centimeters high, brushed aluminum, Matrice / sol is made of five to ten centimeters high, white resin ( cast resin). The Portuguese philosopher and art critic Paulo Pires do Vale wrote about Matrice on the occasion of the Préfigurer 2016 exhibition : “Thurnauer's work brings us into the open more than defined words or discourses. It gives us a place where something indefinite can arise. Emptiness that allows excess. We step into the playful and plastic realm of childhood. ”In some exhibitions Thurnauer installed Matrice like a wave of language that runs towards one of her paintings with feminized artist names.

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibitions

2001: Pour en venir au monde , Center d'art contemporain d'Ivry - le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine
2003: Les circonstances ne sont pas atténuantes , Palais de Tokyo , Paris
2003: Maintenant avant après , Ghislaine Hussenot Gallery, Paris
2004: Don't pretend you've never heard of it , Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen
2005: I will survive , Wim Reiff Gallery, Maastricht
2006: Around a round , Ghislaine Hussenot Gallery, Paris
2007: Bien faite, mal faite, pas faite , SMAK , Gent
2009: Thurnauer à Angers , Musée des beaux-arts d'Angers, Angers
2011: Manifestement , Espace d'Art Contemporain André Malraux, Colmar
2011: Sujet, verbe et compléments Immanence, Paris
2013: Drawing Now Paris , Galerie de Roussan, Carrousel du Louvre , Paris
2014: Figure libre , Le Radar, Center d'art Contemporain, Bayeux
2014: Sleepwalking Galerie de Roussan, Paris
2015: You , Jesus College, Cambridge University
2016: Agnes Thurnauer. Prèfigurer , Fernand Léger Gallery, Paris

Group exhibitions

2005: Biennale de Lyon , Lyon
2006: Notre histoire , Palais de Tokyo , Paris
2006: ART FRANCE BERLIN: Peintures / Painting , Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin
2009: elles @ centrepompidou , Center Pompidou , Paris
2013: Lunch with Olympia , Edgewood Gallery, Yale School of Art, USA
2013: Jardin de langage , Fondation Poppy et Pierre Salinger, Thor
2014: “GIRL” , Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
2014: Cet obscur objet du désir - Autour de l'Origine du monde , Musée Gustave Courbet, Ornans
2016/2017: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious , WhiteBox Gallery, New York
2017: HERstory - des archives à l'heure des postféminismes , Maison des Arts de Malakoff

Web links

Commons : Agnès Thurnauer - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

^ Agnès Thurnauer , Center Pompidou

↑ ^a ^b ^c Floris Taton: Thurnauer Agnes , in: Christine Bard (Ed.): Dictionnaire des féministes. France - XVIIIe – XXIe siècle , Presses universitaires de France, Paris 2017, ISBN 978-2-13-078720-4 (the Kindle edition was used)

↑ Journal et autres écrits. Agnès Thurnauer , Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions (Collection Écrits d'artistes), Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-84056-398-3

↑ Martina Zimmermann: Vagina Monologues in Art. “The dark object of desires” in the Courbet Museum in Ornans , Deutschlandfunk Kultur, June 8, 2014

↑ Paulo Pires do Vale: Le lieu est la parole, la parole est le lieu , catalog for the Agnès Thurnauer exhibition . Préfigurer , Galerie Fernand Lèger, March 25 - May 21, 2016 (catalog as pdf for download)