ROME.- In the SOLO/MULTI feature, the column of Museum for Preventive Imagination, dedicated to exploring new approaches to the exhibition as a medium,
MACRO presents the first major solo show by Nathalie Du Pasquier in an Italian museum. The French artist and designer has approached this show as a Gesamtkunstwerk—a “silent symphony” as the artist says—comprised of a body of more than a hundred works produced from the 1980s to the present.
Nathalie Du Pasquier looks at reality as a catalogue “from which we can take everything—she asserts—and transform it into another world”. She has always been intrigued by the relationship between objects and the space in which they exist. Over the years, this process of investigation has taken form in paintings, sculptures, drawings, models, constructions, carpets, books and ceramics—always poised between representation and abstraction, twodimensional depiction and volume. Her painting is “expanded”, poetically playing with complex harmonies of forms, granting life to inanimate objects without imposing any narrative, leaving the interpretation up to the viewer. A painting that exists as object, space or environment, in which any distinction between the work of art and its display structure has been erased.
For Nathalie Du Pasquier, in fact, the device of the exhibition is a dynamic tool that allows her to use her works as “raw material” with which to build other, new creations. In this sense, the inclusion of works from past decades, juxtaposed with others from different periods, avoids the conventions of the retrospective, generating a single, large installation.
In contrast with the vast size of the exhibition space, the show is installed at human height. Nathalie Du Pasquier has worked on the walls as if they were immense canvases, painting them in different colours and shaping the room to transform it into a single setting, where the visitor/explorer can encounter paintings, drawings, prints and three-dimensional constructions. All these elements, combined in keeping with different logics, “play” together like an ensemble, in a colourful musical battle that alters our perception of the space around them.
In spring 2022, the exhibition will be held at Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée of Sérignan, and a publication will be co-produced for the occasion.
Nathalie Du Pasquier (Bordeaux, 1957) lives in Milan. Her career began as an autodidact, traveling at a very early age through Africa, Australia and India, reading and observing other cultures. In 1979 she arrived in Italy, first in Rome and then in Milan, where she met several designers who set her along the path of European and urban 20th century culture. In 1981 she became part of the Memphis group, for which she was to design many fabrics, carpets and other items. In 1987 she decided to concentrate entirely on painting. She looked at works from antiquity to the 20th century, making oil paintings and soon focusing on the production of still lifes. Over time, the everyday objects depicted in her paintings were replaced by wooden objects constructed by the artist herself. This was her pathway towards abstraction. Today her work generates a dialogue between abstract painting and threedimensional constructions arranged in space. Recent solo exhibitions include: BRIC, Mutina for Art, Fiorano Modenese (2019); Fair Game Leipzig, GfZK, Leipzig (2019); Fair Game, MGLC – International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2018); BIG OBJECTS NOT ALWAYS SILENT, ICA, Philadelphia (2017) and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2016).
