Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is delighted to announce a new solo exhibition featuring Sophie Bouvier Ausländer entitled Fishing the World.
Our planet and how humankind shapes and transforms it has been the subject of Sophie Bouvier Ausländer's artistic research. For Fishing the World, as the title indicates, the artist remains true to her exploration of our planet. The exhibition __showcases pieces from her latest series entitled Call Me Ishmael, taking its name from the opening sentence of Melville's iconic novel Moby Dick. Imbued by the novel's symbolism, biblical as well as fictional, the artist's new body of work is rich in metaphors that softly slip into our imagination like a weaving.
Before creating the series Call me Ishmael, Bouvier Ausländer she crafted sculptural net-like structures, which serve as objects of their own as well as stencils for her paintings. For Call Me Ishmael, the artist places these grid-like sculptures onto various supports, such as maps, newspapers, tissue and Japanese paper, then sprays gouache paint over them to transfer a ghostly image, or shadow of the netting. These nets loom in variations in all the new works, resembling a moving grid that appears, fades and vanishes, similar to a fisherman's net in the water.
The sea setting and its symbolism in Melville's novel are echoed in the recent series through the use of sprayed and diluted gouache in flowing and effusive compositions. Expressive lines and shapes capture the tumultuous atmosphere of Melville's narrative. Rather than confining herself to the deep blue sea shade, the artist explores a spectrum of colours—pink, green, and yellow—sputtered, sprinkled and squirted onto the various media to mesmerising visual effects. As in the former series, fragments of the underlying maps or newspaper print occasionally peak through to offer yet another dimension in the work and its appreciation.
The interplay of physical and psychological dimensions is central to Bouvier Ausländer's research. The enlivened grid, or wafting net reshapes to a membrane that permeates between the image, its metaphors and our senses, between our inner and outer worlds. The narrator's identity in Moby Dick remains elusive. Similarly, Bouvier Ausländer steps back from proposing how our planet is shaped. Instead, she invites us on a multisensory journey to fish for the complexities of our world.
Sophie Bouvier Ausländer has held numerous solo and group shows in Switzerland, France and the UK. Her works entered important institutional collections such as the Musée d'Art de Pully and the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle. The artist has recently received the prestigious Grand Prix awarded by the Fondation Vaudoise pour la Culture.
Press release courtesy Patrick Heide Contemporary Art.
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