Dutch artist Marie Cecile Thijs responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with a new work, Biospheres. A special edition that you can discover exclusively at Galerie XII Paris. The artist questions here a new society where distance is the key. Like humans, flowers remain attracted to each other, regardless of the obstacles and challenges they face. Two flowers together but each in its bubble, a way for the artist to remind everyone of all living things that they share the same biosphere and that it is important to take care of it.
Marie Cecile Thijs pursues an original work. The composition of her images, her use of light and her backgrounds evoke the Dutch “Old Masters”. Her subjects are often surreal while referring to contemporary societal issues. This duality – between old and new, familiarity and the strange – is the key to her art.
Biography
Netherlands, 1964
After practicing the profession of lawyer, Marie-Cécile Thijs decided fifteen years ago to devote herself full-time to her passion for photography. It is part of the “Staged Photography” movement with several series initiated around 2000 and which continue today: “White Collar”; “Food Portraits”; “Cooks”; “Horses” and “Human Angels”. “White Collar”, and more recently still lifes showing Asia and Amsterdam, were produced in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
A first retrospective was dedicated to her at the Museum aan het Vrijthof Maastricht in 2015. In 2016, her photographs are part of the Dutch Identity exhibition at the Museum De Fundatie Zwolle. Others were exhibited in the EU 2016 Dutch Pavilion as part of the Netherlands’ presidency of the European Union. Also in 2016, Corso Como Shanghai dedicated a personal exhibition to him, with the support of the government of the Netherlands. In 2018, the Jan Cunem Museum exhibited around sixty prints on an entire floor. Marie Cecile Thijs regularly collaborates with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam who entrusts her with objects for her photographs. It is exhibited every year at TEFAF in Maastricht. Her works are part of numerous museum and private collections.
Galerie XII Paris
14 rue des Jardins Saint-Paul – Paris 4e
