Mimosa Echard, exhibition view, Gallery Weekend Beijing, China (2023). Photo: Yang Hao. © Mimosa Echard/ADAGP, Paris (2023).
Galerie Chantal Crousel is pleased to present the work of Mimosa Echard for the first time in China on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Beijing. The exhibition continues the ongoing project Sporal1, which the artist initiated for her solo show at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2022.
A selection of new works, inspired by her research into myxomycetes, expand on Echard’s questioning of sexuality, reproduction, and the limits of immersion. Otherwise known as slime molds, these unicellular organisms are neither animals, plants nor fungi and they release spores in the process of reproduction.
Sporal, the video work, stems from the first video game created by the artist, where the player is invited to explore the inner cavities of a single-cell organism in perpetual transformation. Projected onto a hallucinatory patchwork, the viewer observes the players’ evolution through the game as though in a dream: talking to flowers, collecting poetic fragments, or unlocking "sexual types" reminiscent of the many hundreds generated by myxomycetes.
Her artistic practice, characterized as "collecting both natural and manufactured materials in order to bring them into dialogue, one contaminating the other"2 is particularly manifest in her paintings. These works pair images from the video game with photos of Takachiho gorge, filmed during her research in Japan, combining them with various objects embedded into the canvas’ surface (pills, cosmetics, flowers, plastic pistils, lace…). Everything is then covered with liquid, this having the effect of both veiling the composition and "short-circuit[ing] her own authority"3, each element caught in a state of transformation.
The hanging Sap sculptures are created through using the same technique of superimposed objects and references. The streaked silhouettes, evoking flowing resin or tree sap, also bring to mind spiraling DNA patterns or intricate lines of computer code, whose alternating rhythm is replicated through the succession of beads. Hovering between natural and synthetic form, the sculptures ambivalently evoke both "dry waterfalls"3 and surveillance devices.
1 Sporal: (biology) relative to spores, reproductive cells found in most cryptogamic organisms as well as in certain protozoans (Encyclopædia Universalis online).
2 Mimosa Echard: Sporal, exhibition text at the Palais de Tokyo (2022).
3 Quotes from the artist.
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