Marie Bourget

A discreet but acclaimed figure in sculpture in the 1980s, Marie Bourget developed a practice that confronted apparently simple forms and designs with language. Working by analogy and serialization, giving her pieces titles that were more troubling than enlightening, she twists with giddy pleasure and a dry sense of humor the codes of perception. Drawings, sculptures or viewing devices that catch the gaze off guard. As she pointed out, "Turning things back to front allows the front to surprise me and surprise the viewer. Through my work, I would like people to see things for the first time." Painstaking work, realized with great economy of means, that undermines, to the point of collapse, our perceptional confidence in the world in which we live.

Landscape and architecture, their manner of representation and the visual schemas they produce are her fields of predilection. Thus, Images réversibles uses the cavalier perspective to produce an ambivalent image, at once front and back. Instilling doubt, and just as disconcerting visually with La Fabrication des églises (the fabrication of churches), recasting mountain ridges in the role of village skyline. In the artist’s Le Rêve des chateaux de sable (the dream of sand castles) series, comprising ten lithographs, she deploys a collection of easily recognizable schematic forms from the world and imagery of childhood – crenellations, dungeons and swirls, above all. A series of images whose hazy or tentative lines seem on the verge of erasure, and whose title prolongs the doubt inscribed in the language itself: whose dream? A fine opportunity to rediscover this artist’s work, opening up to the imagination while undermining with gentle and amused cruelty the authority of the gaze, knowledge and judgment.

In partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse