A far cry from the classical, trite representations we’ve grown used to, the exhibition La Femme d’à côté (The Woman Next Door), currently on view at the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris, approaches the issue of women in a transdisciplinary way. An explicit reference to the film by François Truffaut, the exhibition brings together the work of twenty women artists and explores the relationship between the artist and her model.
While the main focus is photography, the portrait of this multifaceted, fragmented woman is complemented by paintings, watercolors, sculptures and videos. Curator and co-director of the gallery, Charlotte Boudon, wanted the setting to be theatrical, since these artists rely on staging their work. Whether they make themselves or some anonymous figure the subject, these artists are saying something about themselves, however implicitly, with a tendency towards the phantasmagoric. Women grow wings or turn into trees in the work of Janaina Tschape and Juul Kraijer, respectively. Through various pictorial, literary and cinematic references, the woman is embodied in the work and transformed gradually into some wild dream.
Later, we discover a more frontal aspect, one that undermines the traditional codes of the portrait. Something anachronistic and disturbing slips into Nelli Palomäki’s view camera portraits. With Belgravia, the photographer Karen Knorr places herself into carefully composed bourgeois interiors. The accompanying text breaks with how we might have interpreted the works. More realistic here, the woman faces us. She’s no longer seen from behind or looking stealthily at the camera. Seen as a couple or back-to-back, the double punctuates this exhibition. From the Martin Sisters to those of Marie Maurel de Maillé, it’s a considered image that refers back to the multiple facets of a now-kaleidoscopic woman. Real or fictional, the figures of these heroines echo each other in an infinitely resonating ballet, delivering a vision of this complex and multifaceted vision of woman.
The exhibition ends with the ambiguous work of Helena Almeida, leaving the question open. It’s a way of saying that this “woman next door” isn’t always where you’d expect her to be. For the majority of these artists, mostly represented by the gallery, it’s not a question of working “on” women but working “around” women. The little sister of the exhibition Femina, presented in 2004 in Brussels by its artistic director Christine Ollier, it’s possible that the latter is only a prelude to a long series, and that the gallery may give birth, in the future, to a new opus.
La Femme d’à Côté
January 25 – February 22 février 2014
Currator : Charlotte Boudon
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire
75003 Paris
France
Tél. : +33 (0)1 42 74 47 05
[email protected]
