After Stockholm and Amsterdam, Francesca Woodman’s shooting star alights on the rooftops of Paris, at the Fondation Cartier-Bresson. On Being an Angel, the title of one of her emblematic series and the title of the itinerant European exhibition, raises the obsessive question of the mise-en-abime of the self and one’s own demons in front of the camera.
The Eye of Photography is giving away 20 invitations to the exhibition.*
With about a hundred photos, videos, and documents (Francesca kept a journal and wrote poetry), we are plunged into a feverish, compulsive metaphysical and intellectual exploration that covers less than a decade of creation: aged 22, the artist jumped to her death from her New York loft. This fall of an angel turned her into a legend and has remained a measure of the inner torments she choreographed within the four walls of her apartment with a sense of extreme urgency. This subtle game of hide and seek resulted in some 800 negatives raising the issues of the imprint, of the double, of avoidance, of breakdown in time and space, of dissolution in a photographic bath. Mirrors, bodies, ghosts, screens, wall fissures … are frozen and inscribed within the square format of black and white photographs. Francesca was barely 13 when she first took hold of the camera given to her by her father, a painter as well as photographer. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she never stopped proclaiming her legitimacy as a photographer, with a steadfast will to exhibit her work. But time stopped in its tracks in order to lend these disquieting incantations a sense of transience. They’re like a precocious, piercing intuition thrown into the face of the world.
Following the shows at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the Rencontres d’Arles in 1998, this exceptional body of work makes landmark return to France.
* The first 20 readers to send us an email at [email protected] with their name and address will obtain free invitations to the exhibition.
EXHIBITION
On Being an Angel
Francesca Woodman
From May 11th to July 31st, 2016
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
2 Impasse Lebouis
75014 Paris
France
http://www.henricartierbresson.org
BOOK
Francesca Woodman : Devenir un ange
Xavier Barral
Texts by : Agnès Sire
Anna Tellgren
Anna-Karin Palm
George Woodman
Relié
17 x 23,5 cm
232 pages
103 B&W photographs
ISBN : 978-2-36511-096-9
35€
http://exb.fr
