Céleste Boursier-Mougenot presents Liquide-Liquide to the Schneider Foundation

A major figure on the French and international art scene, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot responds to the carte blanche proposed by the François Schneider Foundation by exhibiting Liquid-liquid, from June 7 to September 22, 2019. An exceptional exhibition with new works designed in situ by the artist and produced by the Foundation.

 

L’artist who represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2015, takes over the entire art centre with poetry by knife and redecorates it. in situ a set of visual and sound installations that confuse the visitor. The usual circulation is reversed to create a path that leads from the depths of the building to its summit. Materials flow, escape, spread.

 

 

From the terraces of the foundation to its entrails, glass, water, mineral are deployed. Both minimal and sophisticated, the work of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is a skilful fusion of science and fiction. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is the forerunner of improbable encounters between the living and the manufactured objects that populate our world and to which he gives an extra soul. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot shapes her hybrid works with the mastery of a craftsman and the "irrationality" of an engineer.

 

 

He draws from his experience in the theatre a subtle staging of space. Believing that too much visual noise undermines the experience of listening, he recomposes a sensory and light parade in the heart of the art centre, where the visitor becomes in turn a tightrope walker, a swimmer, a cosmonaut... By choosing as title Liquid LiquidEchoing the famous New York post-punk band of the 1980s, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot sets the tone for the Foundation's summer exhibition: vibrant, alternative and free.

 

A committed actor of the Nice underground at the end of the seventies, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot forged a solid visual and sound culture from an early age, where space issues quickly preoccupied him. Bathed in a milieu of artists and intellectuals - a grandfather a painter, a father a glassmaker, a sculptor and then a garden historian, and a mother a sociologist of the city - he answers with his works to tangible questions using different tools and creating devices that subvert by forcefully and gently marrying the constraints of space.

 

From his laborious but assiduous experience at the Nice Conservatory of Music and Dance as a child and teenager, his unfitness for academic models led him to become the composer of the company Side One / Posthume Théâtre (1985-1994) for which the author and director Pascal Rambert gave him carte blanche.

 

He then unfolds his musical project by creating increasingly physical installations that integrate moving forms. French artist laureate of the International Studio Program (PS-1) in New York in 1998-1999, his stay in the United States encouraged him to develop more and more concrete experiments and actions. He has made a name for himself with his musical installations, notably From here to ear where the visitor is invited to enter "bird territory" in a museum room transformed into an aviary, or its famous inflatable swimming pools (Untitled) filled with water and porcelain vessels that tinkle at the Paula Cooper Gallery (1999).

 

From then on, he tells stories of the living and the ephemeral. For thirty years, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has been working in France and abroad, with a constant concern for dialogue between technique and imagination. On the fringe of the commercial circuits, he develops projects almost exclusively in situ.

 

His work has been exhibited in major institutions, most recently at the last two Lyon Biennials (2015-2017) and at the Minsheng Museum in Shanghai (2017), the Venice Biennale (2015), the Palais de Tokyo (2015), the National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne (2013), the Barbican Art Centre in London (2010) and the Pinacoteca in São Paulo (2009).

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is represented by the galleries Paula Cooper (New York), Xippas (Paris, Geneva, Montevideo, Athens) and Mario Mazzoli (Berlin). Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was born in Nice in 1961. Father of 4 children, he lives and works in Sète in France.

 

Exhibition Liquid-Liquid to the François Schneider Foundation of the June 7 to September 22, 2019 - Centre d'art, 27 Rue de la Première Armée - 68700 Wattwiller

 

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