Peter Freeman

Anne-Marie Schneider

16 Nov 2013 - 19 Jan 2014

Exhibition view
ANNE-MARIE SCHNEIDER
16 November 2013 - 19 January 2014

We are delighted to present the gallery’s third solo exhibition of French artist Anne-Marie Schneider. The exhibition is her first in Paris since Schneider’s 2008 solo show at ARC, and so gathers together work from 2009 to the present. While in the past Schneider’s work has included film, and even sculpture, this exhibition is focused on drawing, most with a new intensity of color that supports an often psychologically charged imagery.

The newest work, all 2012 and 2013, feels both spontaneous and searching, especially in two new large suites, one depicting girls at play, and the other just faces, often contorted and awash in color. The expressionism of these new series contrasts with her previous, more geometrically reduced and almost formal figurative work that was featured in the 2010 Prix Marcel Duchamp presentation, work now currently on exhibition at the Centre Pompidou as part of the Florence and Daniel Guerlain Collection donation.

Also included is a group of oil paintings (rare in Schneider’s work) and drawings inspired by Beauty and the Beast, all from 2009-10, works that had first been presented over the last year in Lille as an artist’s intervention hung amongst the permanent collections of LAM (Musée d'Art moderne, d'Art contemporain et d'Art brut de Villeneuve-d’Ascq).

On the first floor of the gallery are installed 14 large-scale drawings from 2009, though exhibited now for the first time. These sheets are unusually big for Schneider (120 x 80 cm), and bring to the work a format that allows for drawings of greater narrative in which Schneider often sets figures into abstracted urban settings that seem to balance pattern and personae.

Schneider approaches drawing in the same way as one might keep a personal diary, some works revealing her most intimate thoughts, and others reacting to the news headlines or just every-day-life events. Often based on poetic associations of ideas, her work notably broaches themes of duality and exclusion, of the woman’s role in society, the world of childhood, and fairy tales; a delicate and personal universe which perpetually oscillates between dream and reality, humour and tragedy, pleasure and pain. Her point of view is at once tough and tender: she captures the essential and transmits emotions with a huge economy of means.

In this new exhibition at the gallery, intense color is perhaps the unifying feature of all the drawings, regardless of subject, Scheider’s work of recent years largely forsaking her previous preference for India ink and charcoal for the infinite chromatic range of gouache, watercolour and acrylic.


Anne-Marie Schneider was born in 1962 in Chauny. She lives and works in Paris. She participated in Documenta X in Kassel in 1997. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the ARC-Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2003 and 2008. Drawings and films were shown at the Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’Art moderne in the exhibitions Airs de Paris (2007) and Elles (2009-2010). The Museum Het Domein (Sittard, Netherlands) organised a retrospective in 2009-2010: Jambes Longues. In 2010, she was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp prize. In 2013, the LAM (Musée d'Art moderne, d'Art contemporain et d'art brut de Villeneuve-d’Ascq) presented her works on the theme of Beauty and the Beast amongst its collections. An ensemble of drawings is currently being presented in the Cabinet d’art graphique at the Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’Art moderne, in the exhibition featuring Florence and Daniel Guerlain’s donation, through March 31st, 2014.
 

Tags: Marcel Duchamp, Anne-Marie Schneider