Palais de Tokyo

Anita Molinero

Fill up that hole!

16 Feb - 09 Sep 2018

Anita Molinero, Fill up that hole!
Exhibition view
© Palais de Tokyo
ANITA MOLINERO
Fill up that hole!
16 February – 09 September 2018

Commissaire : Yoann Gourmel

Deployed in the air, above the landing of Palais de Tokyo’s main staircase and its surrounding space, the installation conceived by Anita Molinero is made up of a large sculpture of burnt polyfoam, a kind of fossilised planet or spaceship with hesitant technology. Like a mute “guardian”, a chained sculpture covered with fur watches over this aerial scene with its urban apocalyptic, Z-movie appearance.

For over thirty years, Anita Molinero has been exploring the fundamentals of sculpture: fullness and emptiness, matter and volume, weight and mass, while focusing on the irreversible energy of gestures and improvisation. Objects taken from everyday life and the heteroclite materials she retrieves (bins and plastic or resin urban furniture, polystyrene, synthetic foams, toys, car parts, packaging, assorted trash...) are worked-on using a flamer to produce varied, proliferating forms. Carbonisations and undulations, gaps and swellings, effects of crystallisation and blossoming thus appear on the shrill surfaces of these ordinary materials, in a tense balance between form and formlessness, between the resistance of the material and the expressiveness of gestures.

The transformation of these materials from the industrial world plunges us into a universe comparable to that of the science-fiction films which the artist enjoys, not so much for their catastrophe scenarios as for their sets and special effects. She thus uses the term “form-fictions” to describe her mutant works. Nor they offer real narrative resolutions neither an illustration of social or political commentaries concerning excessive consumption or ecology. Through the exhibition of their precarious states, through their formal inventiveness, through their sometimes obscene violence as well as their jubilatory humour, they impose themselves as witnesses of the tumult of the modern world.

“A block of burnt weathering-like polyfoam, as orange and warm as embers like in Mad Max, passed through the bay windows of Palais de Tokyo and scattered in the space.” Anita Molinero

Anita Molinero
Anita Molinero est née en 1953 à Floirac, elle vit à Paris.
En 1994 elle participe aux côtés de Frank Stella, John Chamberlain, Robert Grosvenor, Carel Visser et Nancy Rubins à l’exposition « Country sculpture » au Consortium de Dijon. Le Frac Limousin en 2002, le Grand Café en 2003, le Mamco à Genève en 2006, le Frac Alsace et le Frac Basse-Normandie en 2009, le Consortium de Dijon en 2014 et le Museo Ettore Fico à Turin en 2015 lui ont consacré des expositions personnelles. En 2012, elle a été choisie pour créer la station de la porte de la Villette sur la ligne 3b du tramway d’Île-de-France. En 2015, elle obtient le prix résidence de la Fondation Salomon à New York. Ses oeuvres font partie d’importantes collections publiques dont celles du Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, du Frac Alsace, du Frac Bretagne, du Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, du Fonds national d’art contemporain, du Consortium, Dijon ou encore du Mamco, Genève.
Elle est représentée par la galerie Thomas Bernard / Cortex Athletico à Paris.
 

Tags: John Chamberlain, Yoann Gourmel, Robert Grosvenor, Anita Molinero, Nancy Rubins, Frank Stella