Agnès Thurnauer's Tripartite Exhibition Across France

Three complementary exhibitions of Agnès Thurnauer's work were held simultaneously in early 2014: a retrospective at the Musée des beaux-arts in Nantes (February 28 – May 11), a show focusing on painting and text at Le Radar in Bayeux (January 2 – April 16), and a selection at Galerie de Roussan in Paris (March 21 – May 24). The exhibitions offered a panoramic view of her complex, parthenogenetic pictorial practice, characterized by series that generate, quote, and feed off each other in a deliberately labile mirror process. Thurnauer treats painting as an active interlocutor, engaging in a physical and mental face-to-face. At Nantes, works like the double figures of Big-Big and Bang-Bang, the You series drawings based on historical portraits, and the Ailes chamarrées and Biotopes with their journalistic texts, create a specular experience. At Le Radar, permutations and stratifications were highlighted, including the installation Matrice (present in all three venues), which invites literal walking through a Penelope-like weaving of words and paint. The Paris show offered a shelf version of Matrice alongside selected pictorial gems. Critic Ann Hindry notes that Thurnauer's visual pleasure masks a sophisticated contemporary approach to being and seeing in painting. Forthcoming publications include Journal et autres écrits (Énsb-a, Paris, 2014) and Manet, la peinture comme réciprocité (JNF Éditions, Paris, 2014).