Press Release

Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present Nathalie Du Pasquier’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Until 1987, she worked as a designer of patterns, textiles, decorated surfaces, objects and furnitures associated with the Italian design group Memphis. Since then, she has been devoting herself to painting while exploring the medium’s porous relationship with design. Her work is defined by an expansive approach to painting that encompasses sculpture, drawing, ceramics, carpets, wallpaper, typography and bookmaking. In her playful and sensuous installations, she devises structures of display where these elements come together, collapsing painterly space and architecture.

With great care and attention, Du Pasquier arranges objects into intricate still-lifes. She brings these objects to develop complex yet playful relationships both in her handling of pictorial space, and in her consideration of paintings as tangible things. Throughout her work, she continuously constructs and deconstructs the boundaries of the frame in such a way that shapes which appear to be neatly contained for an instant, can, a second later, be seen populating the wall around the corner. In doing so, she fosters a sense adjacency that challenges the modernist precepts of abstraction and autonomy by reclaiming the ‘the decorative.’ This notion of adjacency is no stranger to the way Memphis patterns were designed to move freely form one surface to another.

Like maps of an interior world, her paintings distill the eclectic but precise influences that inform her perception—from Persian and French miniatures to Gabonese sign-paintings, from Giorgio de Chirico to Giorgio Morandi. For this exhibition, Du Pasquier conceived a new body of work that includes paintings and sculptural elements. The abstract shapes in her paintings form intimate constructions, echoed in the sculptural components and support structures that accompanies them, thereby blurring the line between the depiction, the model, and the painting as a quotidian object.

Nathalie Du Pasquier (b.1957, Bordeaux, France) lives and works in Milan. Recent solo exhibitions include: Twice in Dublin, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2022); Speed Limit, Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2022); Chez Eux, Villa Savoye Le Corbusier, Poissy (2022); Elementi per paesaggi, Mutina, Milano (2022); Campo di Marte, Musée Régional d’Art Contemporian, Sérignan (2022); Campo di Marte, MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome (2021); Il Treno per Brescia Viaggia con 5 Minuti di Ritardo, Galleria Apalazzo, Brescia (2021); the strange order of things 2, Pace Gallery, Geneva (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Geometric Opulence, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2022); Future, ancien, fugitif: une scène française, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019).

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About the Artist

Nathalie Du Pasquier (b.1957, Bordeaux, France) lives and works in Milan, Italy. Known as one of the founding members of Memphis, the celebrated 1980s Italian postmodern design group, Du Pasquier first worked as a designer of textiles, furniture and objects. Since 1986, she has subsequently been dedicating herself to painting. Du Pasquier’s attitude towards painting is perhaps most striking for the sheer joy in looking that her work proffers a singular pleasure for the appearance of things is certainly notable in the playful compositions of daily objects that characterise her earlier still lifes.

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About the Gallery

Over the past 30 years, Galerie Greta Meert established itself as one of Brussels’ leading contemporary art galleries. Founded in 1988 as Galerie Meert Rihoux, it was subsequently renamed after its founding director Greta Meert in 2006. Located in the center of Brussels, the gallery occupies a five-story Art Nouveau building designed by Louis Bral and renovated for the gallery by renowned Belgian architects Hilde Daem and Paul Robbrecht. Since 2012 three floors of the building are dedicated to exhibitions, making it possible to maintain an expanded exhibition schedule.

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13 Rue du Canal
Brussels
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Tues - Sat, 2pm - 6pm
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Brussels 13 Rue du Canal
Galerie Greta Meert
13 Rue du Canal, Brussels, Belgium

Opening hours
Tues - Sat, 2pm - 6pm
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