Brigitte Zieger's Subversive Utopias at Galerie Odile Ouizeman

Brigitte Zieger's exhibition at Galerie Odile Ouizeman in Paris, running from March 21 to May 9, 2009, takes its title from Jorge Luis Borges. The artist develops a subtle body of work that questions utopias, using wallpaper, journalistic reports, and military posters. With distance and humor, she reveals violence behind pleasant appearances. In the animation "Tank Wallpaper," a bucolic wallpaper is disrupted by an approaching tank. In 2006, she subverted Toile de Jouy patterns by inserting armed women in combat poses ("Shooting Wallpaper"). The series "Flower of Power" camouflages images from the Iraq war behind flower motifs. Drawings in "Up and Down" use shimmering eyeshadow as decoys requiring sustained attention. The highlight is "Sculptures anonymes," life-size resin silhouettes based on press reports, reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's romantic effigies but depicting contemporary icons: the man stopping a tank column on Tiananmen Square, the woman offering a flower to military police. These hollow figures critique the emptiness of iconic images. The exhibition was reviewed by Carole Boulbès.