After winning the HSBC prize in 2015, Maia Flore has been showing through numerous exhibitions a body of work defined by a search for bridges between reality and fantasy. In her art, she distorts, modifies or enhance the world, as to assert that she will not submit herself to its laws.
Since the fall of 2017, the French photographer has been pursuing her research at the Fresnoy- Studio School of Contemporary Arts. This place of education leads her to think about the way the body, actually her first tool, reacts with the environment in which it is placed. Starting from the reality and its limitations, she anchors her body in the landscape she photographs, and with a thoughtful choreography, she balances the space around her.
As part of the Circulation(s) Festival, Maia Flore presents in this exhibition at the Esther Woerdehoff gallery situations that relate her beautiful and endless pursuit of the absolute moment; the one moment when everything is balanced and you feel a thrill that lasts a few seconds and then quickly disappear. Now, we must start again. The photographs are quests, artistic processes fed by the artist’s wandering. She manages to get the photograph out of its frame by intervening after the shooting with collage and a mix of materials.
With this recent research, Maia Flore explores even further the relationship between body and space, and conveys with her images the sensations she herself felt: the falling of her body, the blowing of the wind, the coldness of a block of ice, and finally, the alleviation of having escaped for a few moments from the rules of space and time.
Maia Flore, Au lieu de ce monde
March 14 to May 5, 2018
Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
36 Rue Falguière
75015 Paris
France
