art paris 2007 – press release

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PRESS RELEASE
1°/ GALERIE SOLLERTIS
Management : Brice Fauché
12 rue des Régans
31000 Toulouse - France
Phone number : +33 (0)5 61 55 43 32
Mobile : +33 (0)6 63 53 58 86
Fax : +33 (0) 826 698 154
[email protected]
www.sollertis.com
Since its foundation in 1987 the gallery is located in Toulouse. The gallery
business is divided in two principal areas. Firstly, the exhibition and
representation program focuses on European and north American, all of whom
have made significant contributions within the fields of contemporary art;
Besides, the gallery is showing a whole of very various artistic practices, from
photography to installation, painting and sculpture. Secondly, since 1992,
Sollertis Editions aims at producing and promoting multiples and prints with such
artists as François Morellet, John Armleder, and Olivier Mosset. The crucial point
of our program is to achieve a balance between the promotion of confirmed and
renowned artists on one hand, and young talents on the other one.
2°/ ARTISTS REPRESENTED BY SOLLERTIS GALLERY
Aes
John Armleder
Damien Aspe
Madeleine Berkhemer
Gaston Bertin
Christophe Bruno
Jean-Marc Bustamante
Katia Bourdarel
Sophie Calle
Hannah Collins
Roland Fischer
Pauline Fondevila
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Monique Frydman
Paul-Armand Gette
Fabrice Hyber
Alain Josseau
Elian Lille
Urs Lüthi
François Morellet
Olivier Mosset
Philippe Nuell
Edda Renouf
Yvan Salomone
Romain Slocombe
3°/ ARTISTS INTRODUCED AT ART BEIJING
Madeleine Berkhemer
Katia Bourdarel
Roland Fischer
Xing Danwen
4°/ INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF THESE ARTISTS
Madeleine BERKHEMER
Born in 1973, lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The most important element and the main challenge in Madeleine Berkhemer’s
artistic questionning is to draw out and to test the sculpture to observe its limits.
Former student at the fashion department of the Academy for Visual Arts in
Rotterdam, she found a particular interest in tights both as a material and an
emblematic accessory. Berkhemer’s sculptures are oftenly struck by a tension
between order and chaos, geometric and biomorphic, numerous and singular and
also between continuity and persistent metamorphosis. Her sculptures draw
different colorful baroque organisms, sometimes linked to a wall, like an insect
cocoon, sometimes invading space, like a spider web. Each one of her sculptures
in nothing but the representation of a body, of its outside, flesh and skin, but
also of its inside, organs and entrails. Madeleine Berkhemer’s own body
constitutes its theme. The artist, in her researches about body, has invented
three characters which could be interpreted as alter-ego : Milly, Molly and
Mandy. By creating these three characters, and by keeping control of her own
identity’s implication in these works, she can project herself onto different
situations, including the real world of pornography. Madeleine Berkhemer’s art is
influenced by Rebecca Horn, Paul Thek , La Cicciolina, Pierre Molinier, Camille
Paglia, Alice Sprinkle and Pipilotti Rist.
Solo exhibitions (selection)
2006
Milly’s Maserati Show II, Witte de Withstraat, Rotterdam
L’école des caresses, Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse
2005 Solo exhibition, Art Milliken, Stockholm, Sweden
2004 Ars Futura, Zurich, Switzerland
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Yellow, Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse
Milly’s Maserati, Galerie du Jour, Agnès B.
Group exhibitions (selection)
2006 Nouvelles fabriques d'images et de sons,Fonds Régional d'Art
Contemporain Limousin, Limoges, France
Les fils de Marcel,Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedocroussillon, Sète, France
2005 Artists in Residence, Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria
The Dutch Show, The Dutch Institute, Athens, Greece
Girls, Girls, Girls, Centre d’art Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland
Ladyshave, Cell Project Space, Londres
2004 Art:Milliken gallery, Stockholm, Sweden
Agnèsb. : Je m’installe aux Abattoirs, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse
Katia BOURDAREL
Born in 1969 in Marseille, France. Lives and works in Marseille.
Katia Bourdarel is a young artist who questions the capacity to marvel that
is in each person, by various media (video installations, photographs,
watercolours, paintings). Her world is inhabited by princes and princesses, by
mystery and spells. It depicts our world, in pictures. Her work plays on
similarities, intimacies, familiar links. Everything happens on the surface,
everything is being played,and everything seems easy.But there is something
sideways in these pictures an it is exactly where the peculiarity of her work
emerges. First of all, it is important to say that she does not just re-interpret
fairy tales or that she uses them as a material. As a matter of fact, these pieces
of tales are pieces of gradual change. They do not have secrets in them, but they
are fed by something strange and speculiar. Tale is more disturbing than myth
and it is also what saves us from the myth. What is litteraly presented in Katia
Bourdarel’s work is this kind of undefined and perpetual discovery of the tale.
Her artistic world waters between two positions ; the enchantment of imagination
and the fear of being devoured. Flesh is the main actor in her scenarii. Erotic
flesh, cut up, devoured, tatooed. Between poetry and subtility, a tension
between desire and repulsion emerges. Her work is often about silent presences
which reveals themselves as disturbing, clumsy as a distance that we don’t know
how to break.
Solo exhibitions (selection)
2006 L’expérience verticale, Galerie La B*A*N*K, Paris (France)
Bambi Forever, Galerie des remparts, Toulon (France)
The flesh of fairy tales, Galerie Voss, Düsseldorf (Germany)
2005 De l’autre coté… , Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse (France)
Galerie Roger Pailhas, Marseille (France)
Group exhibitions (selection)
2006 Coup de cœur CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (France)
Made in Marseille, Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse
Bela Lugosi is Dead
Galerie Bernhard Bischoff &Partner, Bern
(Germany)
Ne me raconte pas d’histoires, Fontenay le Comte (France)
2005 Dreams are my reality, Galerie La B*A*N*K, Paris
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Carrera de fondo, Conventa de Santa Inès, Séville (Spain)
2004 C’ la rentrée, Galerie Roger Pailhas
A fripon, fripon et demi, Collection Lambert, Avignon
Roland FISCHER
Born in 1958 in Sarrebrück. Lives and works in Munich (Germany).
From his first series of portraits entitled Moine et Moniales and Los Angeles
Portraits, to more recent cycles like Façades and Cathedrals, Fischer’s audience
has constantly increased during the past few years.
Since the 80’s, he has focused his attention on the question of portrait. In the serie
Moines et Moniales, he penetrates the psychology of characters so that he indicates
universal symbolic values that transcend every concrete individuality. In Los Angeles
Portraits, a lack of emotion is due to the fact that these women are submerged in
water to the shoulders. Their faces gain a symbolic dimension. Surrounded by water,
they are floating in an unspecified world. This way to treat the portrait has an
influence on our perception and also on his works about architectural photographs. In
these series, architecture is tackled like a text to be analysed or like a face to be
portrayed. This approach allowes the artist to underline a critical distance and to
have an objective point of view, in a raw manner, on architecture, by integrating at
the same time the perspicacity of interpretation that is required to the making of a
portrait. In his serie of cathedrals, superimpositions and photographic comparisons
highlight the proper caracteristics of gothic style. The spirituality of Gothic is
introduced by a variety of ornemental combinations and by various constructive
elements. In his cycle entitled Façades, architecture has been transformed into a
fragment. From the buildings of financial chinese district in 1998, Fischer has carried
on with exploring the aspects of this type of architecture, accross the USA, Europe
and, very recently, in South-East of Asia and Japan. The photographic picture is
getting transformed into a radically abstract surface. But the fragment is here
expressive and condensed, to allow the making of a portrait with a psychologic
characteristic. And also to allow the revelation of a sense contained in the façade and
in the building itself, in the context of the multinational’s civilization. To conclude,
seriality, specificity and impersonality drive Fischer to explore links between
individuality and collectivity.
Solo exhibitions (selection)
2006 Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse
2005 Galerie Max Estrella, Madrid
2004 Galerie Walter Storms, Düsseldorf
Von Lintel Gallery, New York
Dombergmuseum, Freising
G Fine art, Washington DC
Galería Maior, Pollença, Mallorca
Galerie Clairefontaine, Luxembourg
CAB Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Burgos
Camino, Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse
2003Pinakothek der Moderne, München
Group exhibitions (selection)
2007 Roland Fischer / Xing Danwen, Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse
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Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Saint-Jacquesde-Compostelle
Cara a Cara, Culturgest, Lisbonne
About Face : photography and the death of the portrait, Hayward
Gallery, Londres
Je t’envisage, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne
Xing DANWEN
Born in Xi’an (China) in 1967. Lives and works in Beijing and New York.
In the late 80s, Xing Danwen discovered photography and was immediately
drawn into this medium. As a self-taught photographer she was the one of a few
artists in the late 80s and 90s in China that was exploring the boudaries of
photography and using photography as an art form. Through the camera, she
observed and challenged the questions on the chinese society, humanity, female
identity and the generation that was born 60s. Her departure to New York
improved and enriched her artistic experience. In her current art-practice she
works, beside photography, also in the field of viedo and multi-media
installations.
Her artistic practice is both rich and varied and her subjects includes : dislocation
between cultural status, conflicts between globalization and tradtions,
problematic environmental issues created by the development, the urban drama
between the desire and reality. Fiction, truth and illusion often play an important
part in her work.
Urban Fictions constructs a modern Chinese city in the process of rapid
urbanization. Drawing upon fiction and theatrical visual language, Xing Danwen
intelligently exaggerates the worries, setbacks, and dreams of urban women who
are immersing themselves in the middle class dream and thus displaying the
loneliness and isolation of urban dwellers as well the human alienation derived
from modern life. In her photographs, the artist presents the real development
plan of chinese cities. These are just maquettes, but they are also an illusion of
reality. Real estate developers clearly create fantasies and dreams. Taking
advantage of digital technology, Xing Danwen manipulates these private spaces
and fills them with the desires of urban women, giving us the chance to peer
together with her into all kinds of secret human dramas performed through her
invented stories taking place inside these architectural models.
Solo exhibitions (selection)
2006 Disconnexion/Duplication, the Chinese Museum, Melbourne
2004 Urban fictions, Galerie Pièce Unique, Paris
2002 Dislocation, the 2nd PingYao International PhotoFestival, Shanxi
China Avant-Garde, Ka-sing Lee Gallery, Toronto
1997 In Sight, Soho Photo Gallery, New York
1994 With chinese eyes, the Gallery Grauwert, Hamburg
Group exhibitions (selection)
2007 Roland Fischer / Xing Danwen, Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse
The Building Show, EXIT ART, New York
2006 Totalstad/Beijing Case, ZKM, Karslruhe, Germany
Made in China, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
2005 Between Past and Future, Victorian and Albert Museum, London
Unspeakable happiness, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo,
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Mexico
Re-Viewing the City, the 1st Guangzhou Photo Biennale, The
Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou
2003 Alors la Chine, Centre Pompidou, Paris
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