Mimosa Echard is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice troubles the distinction between nature and culture. Echard combines organic and synthetic materials to question the binary divide between nature and technology, exploring the complex interchanges that take place between the human body and our material environment.
Read MoreMimosa Echard was born in Alès, a region in the south of France with a history of communal living. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 2010.
Much of the material that makes up Echard's assemblages are objects and plants she has collected along her travels, exchanged with her friends, or gathered from her home region. iDeath, an exhibition at Paris' Galerie Samy Abraham in 2016, counterposed the communal traditions of Alès against the trappings of contemporary life. It features works such as 'A/B', a series of wall-mounted plexiglass containers displaying botanical and manufactured medicines that spread and intermingle beneath the plastic.
Mimosa Echard's work is preoccupied with the lives of materials, whether the cultural associations brought to them by the viewer or the organic processes by which they grow, mutate, or decompose. In LUCA (2019), an installation made in collaboration with French artist Michel Blazy, large fabric hangings emblazoned with cultural images appear to be overcome by wet, spore-like incursions.
Un bout de toi, Salomon, Echard's 2020 solo exhibition at Galeria Martina Simetti Milano continued the commingling of organic and synthetic materials. Mounted within plexiglass chambers, intestine-like casings are stuffed with lichen, synthetic foam, lotus seeds, beeswax, and hair removal cream. They are also studded with trinkets collected during her 2019 residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. Encasing the assemblages in resin, Echard allows their diverse components to bleed into one another and pool against the plastic's surface, forming ambiguous amalgamations that blur the line between sculpture, readymade, and formal abstraction.
Intermixing the human, the organic, and the artificial, Mimosa Echard juxtaposes biological processes and material culture according to their properties. Echard continues to pursue these themes in Numbs, her first solo exhibition with Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, in 2021.
Echard has also undertaken several public projects, including Booster (2012), an installation throughout a staircase at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Mimosa Echard und Michel Blazy: LUCA, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany (2019); Pulsion Potion, Cell Project Space Gallery, London (2017); iDeath, Galerie Samy Abraham, Paris (2016)
Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne (2020); Pretty Anna in the Dialectic of the Stars: Extinction Dancefloor, Platform-L Contemporary Art Centre, Seoul (2018); The Dream of Form, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017).
Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2021
