DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster was born 1965 in Strasbourg, France. She studied at École des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble, L’École du Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble and Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, Paris. The artist lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster participated in the Venice Biennale in 1990, 1993, 1999, 2003, 2009, and 2019. Gonzalez-Foerster participated in Documenta11 in 2002. The artist received the Mies Van der Rohe Award in Krefeld in 1996 and the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Award in 2002. In 2008, she created TH.2058 as part of The Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. In 2022 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster together with Ange Leccia, directors of the film Christophe... définitivement, is included in the Official Selection of 75th Festival de Cannes.

An experimental artist based in Paris, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has, since 1990, been exploring the different modalities of sensory and cognitive relationships between bodies and spaces, real or fictitious, up to the point of questioning the distance between organic and inorganic life. Metabolizing literary and cinematographic, architectural and musical, scientific and pop references, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster creates ‘chambres’ and ‘interiors’, ‘gardens’, ‘attractions’ and ‘planets’, with respect to the multiple meanings that these terms take on in the works of Virginia Woolf or Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Brontë sisters or Thomas Pynchon, Joanna Russ or Philip K. Dick. This investigation of spaces extends to a questioning of the implicit neutrality of practices and exhibition spaces. Her ‘mises en espace’, ‘anticipations’ and ‘apparitions’ seek to invade the sensory domain of the viewers in order to operate intentional changes in their memory and imagination. Haunted by history and future, Gonzalez-Foerster’s works become containers where the artist incubates a form of subjectivity that does not yet exist. Through multiple international exhibitions, short films, productions and concerts, Gonzalez-Foerster’s mutant work contributes to the invention of new technologies of consciousness. (Paul B. Preciado)

The artist’s work is represented in the collections of 21^st museum of contemporary Art Kanazawa; ARC/Musée d´art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fonds National d´Art Contemporain, France; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona and Madrid; Inothim, Belo Horizonte; Musée d´art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Genève; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Samdani Foundation, Dhaka; Sammlung Goetz, Munich.

Text courtesy Esther Schipper.