Nathalie Du Pasquier / Collezioni
Private
R. José Sobral Cid 9E
1900-289 Lisboa – Portugal
1900-289 Lisboa – Portugal
Kunsthalle
Lissabon presents Collezioni Private,
Nathalie Du Pasquier’s most
recent solo show and, despite her already long career, the first time the
artist shows individually in Portugal. The exhibition
will take place from January 25th to April 15th, 2017.
The year 1987 was a turning point in Nathalie Du Pasquier’s career since
she abandoned her career as a designer to focus on painting. Prior to this in
Milan, she met George Sowden and
Ettore Sottsass, and became one of the
founding members of the Memphis Group for whom she designed several “decorated
surfaces” inspired by her trips to Africa and by the ornamentation of the
Wiener Werkstätte, Arts and Crafts and Amédée Ozenfant’s artistic production,
among others. Since 1987 onwards she gradually rediscovered key moments of art
history, from Roman frescoes to Italian Novecento
artists, and involved herself on a constant analysis on the alliance between the
idea of shape and the discipline of painting. Her work, hence, has evolved into
something less reified or objectual and more abstract in order to explore the
tension between the flat surface and the perspectival illusion.
Collezioni Private is developed specifically for Kunsthalle Lissabon and
presents a series of new drawings, close to still lives, which depict Du Pasquier’s ongoing interest on the
expressiveness of quotidian forms and the domestic shape of objects. Ensembles of objects testify the two-dimensionality of
their own representation and suggest the ambivalence of their existence. This series of black, grey and white abstract drawings have no shadows, no backdrops, nor perspective, underlining the ambiguity of how three dimensional compositions
display on a flat surface.
A series of wall sculptures referred to by the artist as three “travel boxes”,
function as displays of abstract compositions and constructions and complete the exhibition, materializing and making
explicit the seemingly illusive role of perspective. These transportable wooden
constructions, private collections, which inspired the title of the show,
constitute themselves little portable exhibitions and depict artist’s ongoing
interest on the oneiric sensation of traveling and together with the drawings
render on our own portable, emotive and private collections.