Agnès Thurnauer, an internationally renowned Franco-Swiss artist who had the honour of hanging a gallery of feminized portraits on the entrance wall of the Centre Pompidou for two years and then at the SAM in Seattle and the CCBB in Rio de Janeiro, will be visiting the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art from 25 June to 25 October 2016.
Her protean work makes her unclassifiable in the contemporary artistic universe and gives full meaning to the retrospective exercise.
The answer that Agnes Thurnauer gives today is in the form of a story, that of painting, which she disguises by feminizing or masculinizing the first names of the greatest heroes of Western painting. In the largest room of the Château, she presents a gallery of Portraits, one of a series of those already presented at the Centre Pompidou, offering a panorama of the history of painting from Nicole Poussin (specially created for the exhibition) to Annie Warhol, including Roberte Mapplethorpe.
Each of these « Grandeur Nature » Portraits, as Thurnauer calls them, is an opportunity for the viewer to remember, or to encounter a work of art, through the artist’s name, emphasizing the meaning and importance of the patronymic. This new complex first name/patronym becomes the form of painting, and makes it possible to extract painting from the notion of gender, to tell another art story: an art story where the creator of the work is no longer in a male or female role, but in a painting role. A role in which he or she embodies this painting that may well not have a genre. A way of saying that in any case this story does not belong to men alone.