In addition to their exhibitions at Château La Coste and Thoronet Abbey, Anne and Patrick Poirier’s work will also be shown this spring in the Silver House at Domaine du Muy.
The Poiriers have been featured in the sculpture park since its creation in 2015; their marvellous Fabrique de la Mémoire, a kind of reflective multi-faceted shrine, encapsulates their profound sources of inspiration while generously drawing visitors in.
Anne and Patrick Poirier’s work is a journey. The artists consider human interaction as a core value, a foundation for all understanding between beings and societies. They are children of the war years; as a result, their aesthetic is often one of fragmentation, ruin, and disaster. Always faithful to the symbiosis which has underpinned their creative process for over fifty years, Anne and Patrick Poirier’s work is protean and visionary.
With acute sensitivity, verging on the extreme, Errances is a selection of moments from the lives of these two artists, united by a shared creative quest to open the world’s eyes to its own humanity. These “snippets of time” from past and present, whether real or fictitious, are depicted through drawing, photography, sculpture, or assemblage, and draw on a multitude of references. Antiquity, classical culture, anthropology, and nature all feed into this work, which is always marked by a deep consciousness of fragility and memory. The myriad of media – drawing, photography, sculpture, and the written word – is mirrored by their prolific artistic creation, which combines a penetrating, distanced style of observation with a more introspective, meditative approach.
The exhibition includes photographs from the series Roma. Anima Mundi (1988), and Archives (2012-2017), as well as a collection of drawings, including Le Journal du Poète (2019). These are complemented by a series of mirror pieces, especially created for this exhibition using an ancient glasswork technique. These works evoke the shape of the ogival windows found in Venetian palazzi (Gaia & Eros), or the quatrefoils popular in ceiling ornamentation since the Renaissance (Memory, Dream, Paradise). They are a reminder of their subtle in situ work at the Palazza Butera in Palermo (2018). The collection will be completed with a number of new works which are still in progress.
After completing their studies at the École nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris, Anne and Patrick Poirier spent four years at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome. Right from the beginning of their stay in 1968 , they decided to work together, thus becoming one of the first artist couples. Rejecting the conventional roles of sculptor and painter, they took on the interchangeable roles of archaeologist and architect. They participated in the Venice Biennale (1976, 1980 and 1984) and documenta 6 in Kassel (1977). Their work was showcased in solo exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1978), the MoMA in New York (1979), and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (1993). More recently, their work has been shown in the Musée d’art modern et contemporain (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) in Saint-Étienne, the Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden (Tony Cragg Foundation) in Wuppertal (2016), the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (2017), the De Pont Museum in Tilburg (2018), and the Villa Medici in Rome (2019).
