Mai-Thu Perret
Moon Palace
28 May–18 July 2015
Blondeau & Cie
5 rue de la Muse
1205 Geneva
Switzerland
Hours: Thursday–Friday 2–6:30pm,
Saturday 11am–5pm
T +41 22 544 95 95
F +41 22 544 95 99
muse [at] blondeau.ch
From May 28 to July 18, Blondeau & Cie is delighted to present Moon Palace, an exhibition by Franco-Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret, in its gallery at 5 rue de la Muse in Geneva, in collaboration with Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich.
Moon Palace is a show that combines the personal and the general, the sensorial and the conceptual, the imaginary and the real.
The works of Mai-Thu Perret proceed by a process of questioning, associating and translating images and ideas inspired by fields as diverse as literature, poetry, constructivism, design, craftsmanship, applied arts, concrete art, the Bauhaus, religion and Dadaism…
Since the late 1990s, when her project The Crystal Frontier presented her work as the creative output of a utopian feminist community in New Mexico, Mai-Thu Perret has taken a particular interest in artisanal techniques and practices in the domestic sphere.
For Moon Palace, she has created a set of new works that extend her exploration of the intersection between the vocabulary of modernism and the applied arts, using a variety of materials and techniques to create large, high-warp tapestries, ceramic reliefs and a sculpture, and a rattan sculpture.
The rattan sculpture appropriates the form of an emblematic work by Sophie Taueber-Arp, Dada Bowl, dating from 1916. The free, transgressive approach taken by Taeuber-Arp, mixing materials, techniques and artistic disciplines (painting, design, decorative arts, etc.) without any sense of hierarchy, sets up an intimate echo with Mai-Thu Perret’s own concerns and experiments.
By deploying her objects within the horizon of a fiction and in the universe of art objects, Mai-Thu Perret deconstructs art in the way others have deconstructed the naturalist novel, revealing artifices and reality effects the better to explore the gap between what the object is and what we would like it to be, between what it “really” is and what “possesses” it. The art coefficient, to use Duchamp’s expression, resides in this degree to which other subjectivities “possess” the object.
Mai-Thu Perret was born in 1976 in Geneva, where she lives and works.
She studied English at Cambridge University and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2011, she won the prestigious Zurich Art Prize and the Prix Culturel Manor.
She is due to have a solo show at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, later in 2015.
Her recent solo shows include Le Magasin, Grenoble, France (2011); MAMCO, Geneva (2011); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2011); Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York (2011); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan (2010); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2009); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008); The Kitchen, New York (2008); and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2006).
Mai-Thu Perret’s work has featured in numerous group shows, including the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2013); Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2013); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012); CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2012); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2012); ILLUMInations (curated by Bice Curiger), 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2010).