LONDON.- Camden Arts Centre presents a major exhibition of new work by Milan-based artist Nathalie Du Pasquier. Challenging modes of representation, her practice has comprised painting, drawing, sculpture, objects, and patterns for textiles, traversing boundaries between art and design. Du Pasquier became known in the early 1980s as a founding member of the Italian design collective Memphis. Since 1987 she has focused on painting, creating bold, abstract and still life compositions which play with architectural planes and perspective.
For her exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Du Pasquier expands beyond the canvas to inhabit the entirety of the gallery spaces as a field of composition. Modular designs and geometric shapes cover the walls, transforming Galleries 1 and 2 into an immersive environment of constructed landscapes. As with her early design work, these vividly-coloured compositions examine the expressive relationship between two- and three-dimensional forms, space and representation to navigate ways of viewing the world. Bright bands of colour painted directly onto the perimeter walls contrasted against busy interior walls and intimate smaller rooms divide Camden Arts Centre’s gallery spaces, shifting between real and illusory sightlines and horizons.
The tradition of image-making underlies Du Pasquier’s practice, inspired by visual artefacts from ancient times through to modern popular culture. Within the exhibition, a small room houses a new series of drawings made daily throughout this summer alongside seven new ceramic sculptures, one for each day of the week, developed from Du Pasquier’s sustained interest in the subtle autobiographical nature of the still life.
Continuing Du Pasquier’s long-standing work with surface design, patterned wallpaper covering the interior of another room is punctuated by irregular shaped raw canvas paintings of pared back abstract compositions. Whilst gravity and weight pull the drawings and ceramic pieces into form, in these works, Du Pasquier frees herself from the limitations of physics. Bringing abstraction to the fore, the compositions remain ambiguous: impossible as constructions in reality but nevertheless retaining a three-dimensional sensibility.
Other Rooms represents Du Pasquier’s desire to transform spaces with her own means, devoid of architectural rules and utilising the tools of the painter – line, colour and form – to transport the viewer to another place.
Nathalie Du Pasquier was born in Bordeaux in 1957 and relocated to Milan in 1979. Until 1986, she worked as a designer and was a founding member of the design group Memphis. In 1987 painting became her main activity. Between 1989 and 2008 she worked regularly with Le Cadre Gallery, Hong Kong, allowing her to develop from her early still lifes to more abstract compositions. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions, including The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (1992) and Pace Gallery, London (2017). The first comprehensive exhibition of Du Pasquier, curated by Luca Lo Pinto was held at Kunsthalle, Vienna in 2016 and a second iteration will take place at the ICA, Philadelphia in September 2017.
