Anne-Marie Schneider: Fragile Incassable

This is French artist Anne-Marie Schneider’s first solo show, which follows on her participation in l’Autre Sommeil, held at ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1999. Her choice of techniques, including drawing and Super 8 film, has led the artist to two parallel and inextricably linked activities: - her drawings, inspired by automatism and based on things seen, related to a ‘daily writing’, like a diary. - her films which rely strongly on animated drawings.

An anthology of drawings - in pen, pastel, watercolour, acrylic and gouache - are brought together here in a random chronology, grouped together in different "families": - allegories incarnated by objects, animals, human beings captured in relationships eluding all hierarchies. - inspirations from texts from Kafka to Coetzee that arouse visual representations. - more engaged drawings - threats of war, the negative effects of capitalism, the status of women, her ritual tasks, her alienation.

A new series revolves around the egg - single and multiple, fragile and unbreakable, the paradoxical metaphor of a territory that is simultaneously positive and negative, which responds to the artist’s necessary toing and froing between the intimate, mental and physical universe and the exterior world that she is a part of.

In the obvious continuation of her graphic pursuits, three Super 8 films - Sans Titre, Code Barre and Mariage - accentuate this chronic dimension by associating documentary images with animated drawings in a montage where controlled improvisation creates a literal and imaginary "small theatre of the world". These films form a kind of language prior to any relationship they actually have with video or cinema.

Drawn sheets or visual poems, Anne-Marie Schneider’s works take advantage of the burlesque, the tragic, the absurd, but also the marvellous, a step back that is essential for confronting the "monsters" of reality. Through a great economy of means and an asserted independence, the artist constructs a necessary space of liberty.

The catalogue of the exhibition gathers together a selection of drawings and of films stills, as well as texts by the artist and different authors : Laurence Bossé, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Jean-François Chevrier, Frédéric Pellion and Angeline Scherf. Pressetext

Anne-Marie Schneider - Fragile Incassable
Kuratorin : Angeline Scherf