PARIS.- The national museum of Chateaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau is presenting a solo exhibition by artist Karine Laval. On the occasion of her exhibition in the gardens of the Château de Malmaison and the park of Bois-Préau, Karine Laval designed an artistic route with free access, intended for visitors and walkers, combining in-situ creations and a selection of works from her series 'Heterotopia'. This artistic route highlighting the variety of flora and viewpoints in the gardens of Malmaison and the park of Bois-Préau will strengthen the link between the castle of Malmaison and that of Bois-Préau, just before the reopening of the latter to the public.

In view of the variety of her exhibition venues, museums or galleries, metro station in New York or airport in San Francisco, department stores in Paris such as Bon Marché and La Samaritaine (Hotel Cheval Blanc), Louis Vuitton stores, a gigantic tower entrance hall visible from the outside in London or her own garden in Brooklyn, Karine Laval is an artist "outside the walls" playing on the boundaries between public space and private space, leisure areas and transit areas, or places of contemplation and places of consumption. Her work is aimed both at informed audiences who have come specially to see it and at the many people who come across her installations by chance. Thanks to the originality of her gaze and her talent as a colorist, she has become a master in capturing the attention of passers-by and plunges them unexpectedly into her surreal and luxuriant universe. Whether it is the place where her images arise or the expression of her singular gaze on a familiar environment, Karine illustrates how emotion is in the unexpected.

Thus, the proposed itinerary brings together the photographs that Karine has taken in situ with those of her emblematic series 'Heterotopia' whose tropical accents recall all of Joséphine's passion for the flora of distant countries. Throughout the exhibition, once again Karine de-compartmentalizes the spaces: the exteriors and interiors of the estate intermingle. Nature erupts on all floors of the Château de Malmaison just as the parakeets once invaded the vestibule with their song. Between unreality, transformed reality and perception of the landscaped viewpoints that inspired the artist, this exhibition accompanies the wanderer from the park of Bois-Préau to the castle of Malmaison through its gardens.

Karine Laval is a French American Brooklyn-based artist. She graduated from the CELSA - Paris Sorbonne in France, where she majored in communications and journalism. A self-taught artist, she completed her art, photography and design education through evening and weekend courses at the School of Visual Arts and the New School in New York.

Her work has been reviewed and featured in international publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, Le Monde, Eyemazing, Next Level, EXIT, to name a few. Her work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Notable recent group exhibitions include ‘Peter Marino Collection’ at Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southampton, NY in 2021, ‘IN VIVO/The nature of nature’ at Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands in 2018, and ‘Obsessions’ at Maison Particulière in Brussels (Belgium) and ‘Radical Color’ at the Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, OR (USA) in 2015. Laval is the recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant and was nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2016 and 2019. Her monograph Poolscapes is published by Steidl in 2018. Anatomy of Desire is published in 2019 by 89books.