Zora Mann and Vivien Cahusac de Caux
Stringfigures and Watercolours
06 Dec 2020 - 21 Jan 2021
The exhibition Stringfigures and Watercolours positions Zora Mann’s watercolour works alongside paintings by her mother, Vivien Cahusac de Caux.
Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1955, Vivien Cahusac de Caux has been painting most of her life. After a nomadic lifestyle including 25 years of living between Uganda and Kenya, she relocated to Germany in 1988. Her rich pictorial expression moves through various styles and subjects throughout a prolific body of work, demonstrating a keen receptivity to her surroundings and resources as a self-taught artist.
In the series Dreamscapes Scenarios, to which the four works in the exhibition belong, fantastical scenes depict forces of life and nature. Bright, intense colours further add to their oneiric constructions. Contrary to much of her other work, which observes different geographic locales, each with its own cultural specificities, Dreamscapes Scenarios is abstracted and introspective.
Zora Star Cahusac Mann was born in 1979 in Amersham, UK. She spent her childhood between Europe, Africa and America. She completed her art studies at the Villa Arson in Nice.
Mann often employs a visual vocabulary picked up from her childhood experiences visiting Kenya, which is combined with a recurring folkloric and often psychedelic style, seen in the repetitive composition of geometric shapes, vibrant colours, and spatial synchronicities characteristic of dreams. Visual fragmentation in Mann’s work may allude to emotional states, as landscapes of the interior layered with meaning, memories, and feelings. Her surreal, enigmatic paintings and sculptures sometimes depict talismanic or symbolic representations that evoke specific people or situations in her life. Mann also approaches the notion of healing and protection through paintings, watercolours, etchings, murals, shields and ceramics– works that through diverse media connect her hybrid cultural background to her interest in natural structures, science fiction and psychology.
The works exhibited in the exhibition illustrate her fascination with the watercolour medium, and how it provides for Mann a particularly meditative and intimate process. In a recent interview with Éric Mangion, Mann states: “The watercolours are in a way a travel diary as a lot of them were made during travels. It is like carrying my home with me. I just take a piece of paper and the colouring box and I can dive into my world.”
Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1955, Vivien Cahusac de Caux has been painting most of her life. After a nomadic lifestyle including 25 years of living between Uganda and Kenya, she relocated to Germany in 1988. Her rich pictorial expression moves through various styles and subjects throughout a prolific body of work, demonstrating a keen receptivity to her surroundings and resources as a self-taught artist.
In the series Dreamscapes Scenarios, to which the four works in the exhibition belong, fantastical scenes depict forces of life and nature. Bright, intense colours further add to their oneiric constructions. Contrary to much of her other work, which observes different geographic locales, each with its own cultural specificities, Dreamscapes Scenarios is abstracted and introspective.
Zora Star Cahusac Mann was born in 1979 in Amersham, UK. She spent her childhood between Europe, Africa and America. She completed her art studies at the Villa Arson in Nice.
Mann often employs a visual vocabulary picked up from her childhood experiences visiting Kenya, which is combined with a recurring folkloric and often psychedelic style, seen in the repetitive composition of geometric shapes, vibrant colours, and spatial synchronicities characteristic of dreams. Visual fragmentation in Mann’s work may allude to emotional states, as landscapes of the interior layered with meaning, memories, and feelings. Her surreal, enigmatic paintings and sculptures sometimes depict talismanic or symbolic representations that evoke specific people or situations in her life. Mann also approaches the notion of healing and protection through paintings, watercolours, etchings, murals, shields and ceramics– works that through diverse media connect her hybrid cultural background to her interest in natural structures, science fiction and psychology.
The works exhibited in the exhibition illustrate her fascination with the watercolour medium, and how it provides for Mann a particularly meditative and intimate process. In a recent interview with Éric Mangion, Mann states: “The watercolours are in a way a travel diary as a lot of them were made during travels. It is like carrying my home with me. I just take a piece of paper and the colouring box and I can dive into my world.”