Alice Maher: winner of the 18th Drawing Prize

In 2007 Florence and Daniel Guerlain decided to focus their efforts on their passion for drawing and founded the Contemporary Drawing Prize.

Intended for artists using graphics as their main vehicle of expression, it sponsors three artists per year. Since 2010 the award ceremony has been held at the Parisian Salon du dessin, an art fair reserved for ancient and modern drawings that attracts collectors, specialists and museums from across the globe and gives rise to much discussion on the presentation and conservation of artworks on paper. The winner receives an award of 15 000 euros while the two runners up each an award of 5 000 euros. A work of the winner is donated by the Foundation to the Prints and Drawings Departement at the Musée national d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou.

Using different media, the root of which remains drawing, Alice Maher delves into ancestral history, myths and the subconscious. She seeks to understand who we are and where we come from. She champions the place of the female body in symbiosis with the animal and vegetal world.

When she entered the art world in the 1980’s, Alice Maher discovered the impertinence of artists like Louise Bourgeois and Helen Chadwick, which encouraged her to not only talk about feminism, but also more widely about the problems of domination and colonialism. She said that she comes from a rural background, from farming, and she had a different relationship with the lanscape. She said she had no romantic notions at all about landscape.

She considers that the landscape has to be inside her, rather than outside her. She is interested in a relationship with the lanscape as an animal, as a human being, an animal. It is related to a kind of colonialism, this whole thing of claiming land and claiming whose land it is, but also reclaiming land.

At the heart of this vast history and this mythology which she is so familiar with, she interprets the stories of Mary Magdalena and Cassandra, multiplies tongues, or masses of long hair.

“Real life” meets that which she has depicted in her drawings for decades.

The subjects are sometimes delicately reworked in small formats in pencil developing between the interior and exterior of the bodies.