For the first time in its history, Galerie de la Béraudière, which specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, presents a contemporary visual artist whose surrealist universe corresponds to one of the gallery’s favourite themes.
Marlène Mocquet is a young French artist (b. 1979) who lives and works in Paris.
The artist’s oeuvre is the site of her full-fledged engagement with her material: whether it be a canvas or a ceramic object, the support becomes a battleground between materials as diverse as oil, acrylic, stoneware, clay, sand, varnish, etc., of which the artist makes abundant use, not unlike Jean Dubuffet or Jean Fautrier.
Impasto, overflowing material and paint drips make up the artist’s playground as she conjures up a surrealist world, her singular world which is packed with fantastic creatures and where both the enjoyment and the fear of nature come together. A world that is at once wonderful and terrifying, and that is populated with characters with oversized and inquiring eyes, birds that can be as malicious as they can be peaceable, bright flowers and vibrant fruit, haunted castles, swarms of monsters, the whole panoply blending sombre tonalities with glowing, vivacious colours! The visitor oscillates between a medieval and contemporary age, permeated with both horrid and playful stories. The spirit of Hieronymus Bosch is not far away!
Marlène Mocquet has already several museum exhibitions under her belt. In 2009 the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon devoted a solo exhibition to her work while more recently, in 2017, the artist took over the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris.
Fleuve, the exhibition at Galerie de la Béraudière, follows this recent museum exhibition in which the venue, steeped in history, was omnipresent. In Brussels, on Rue Jacques Jordaens, the artist will once more cohabit and enter into dialogue with a space that has great character since it is a former artist’s studio. As a result, most of the works on display will be new, having been created in resonance with the location, such as the Tondo, paintings on metal, and the low reliefs that refer to the planets – a galaxy reimagined by the artist. Her galaxy is populated and haunted by curious characters that you can discover until 9 February at Galerie de la Béraudière.
