Exhibition Category: Previous Productions

In 2000, Aurelie Nemours decided to create an annual prize that bears her name. The Aurelie Nemours Prize rewards any artist, regardless of his discipline, whose work pursues the rigorous and spiritual plastic quest that has been his. She wrote: “Thinking that art is a struggle against the disarray of our civilization, I firmly believe that the spiritual charge of art is the only recourse and salvation.” In 2023, two artists will be rewarded: graphic designer Irma Boom and painter Hans-Jörg Glattfelder.

Karine Rougier, the 2022 Drawing Now Prize winner, offers a unique group experience in her 2023 solo exhibition at the Drawing Lab: “Nous qui désirons sans fin”. Awarded the Drawing Now Prize in 2022, the artist is taking advantage of this invitation to propose a real collective walk. From drawings realized with graphite or gouache to paintings, via watercolors, and from films to slideshows, her exhibition offers more than one story. This exhibition is a collection of stories by Karine Rougier and her special guests. Like a plunge into drawing, the exhibition invites us to play, pick a card and read a new world.

The Pulp-e project questions the construction of the image, in its reappropriation, in its writing, in its transposition, includes the body, in order to make us wander through possible narratives. The title refers to the specific typology of pulp (popular comics) and the addition of the E proposes a concrete meaning, the pulp. A hybrid title, the exhibition will present several states: scenarios, set elements, films. The popular and folkloric forms taken up and drawn by Benjamin Hochart will go beyond the framework of the sheet of paper and the Drawing Lab will become the theatre of a new narrative whose various scenarios will be activated by the spectator.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of this Prize, with a delay due to the pandemic, an exhibition is organised by the Aurelie Nemours Association with a choice of works by each of the laureates, presented in the rooms of the Drawing Lab, 17 rue de Richelieu in Paris from July 1 to September 21, 2022.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue and its opening will coincide in the same venue with the presentation of the 2021 prize to Pe Lang and Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri on 30 June 2022 by Mr Xavier Darcos, Chancellor of the Institut de France.

Irrespective of their subject matter, all drawings start with a dot, then a line to another, and so on. A bit like mapping a path from point A to point B. Which is also how humans connected the stars in the night sky. It’s how constellations were created, and the way they are still represented today.
Might star constellations not have been the first de facto abstract drawings?
Yet, still today, these celestial drawings situate our very bodies and individual identities. Between two fictitious points. Between two planes: the earth and the sky.
Series of points like these which are connected by lines, let us project ourselves into the future and imagine more intricate drawings or paths to follow. That is the starting point of Du Temps sois la mesure (“Of Time be the Measure”). A handful of strokes and dots whose intention extends beyond what we can see: a more extensive pictorial projection, a measure of space and time.

The exhibition I See a Bird / Je vois un oiseau is the scene of multiple narratives, a succession of “drawn voyages,” where changing landscapes, real or fictional, blend into each other. Connected in a fluid and borderless environment, birds are our guides here. Free and autonomous, they embody the problems of lines, trajectories, energy (“creative wings”), the ways of the world, and landscapes, which all permeate the work of Chourouk Hriech. Through drawing, the artist creates a metaphorical location, a city-world whose main inhabitants are birds that are also witnesses to the ecological crisis.

The black numeral refers to the difference in subjectivity between two opposing forces. Between fantasy and rationalism, these figures ultimately prove to be false since they are based on an unknown. It is these unknowns that Nicolas Daubanes is attacking. The exhibition Le Chiffre Noir is not a pleasure walk. Quite the contrary. The subjects treated by the artist are neither beautiful nor light. And yet. In his practice, Nicolas Daubanes confronts the strongest or most fragile materials that are created from fire. For this solo exhibition at the Drawing Lab, concrete, glass, ceramics, iron filings (signature)… are works that carry stories that question us in our relationship with the past and the collective memory.

Around the world, the oldest artistic expressions are linked to a spiritual approach and most of them have been discovered inside caves. The cave is a universal archetype of self-reflection and communication with other kingdoms, closely related to the symbol of the “heart”. Using the heart of the cave as a mythological setting and anchor, Vanessa Enríquez has withdrawn and connected over the past year to the ancestral practices of drawing, singing and ritual using the VHS magnetic tape as a drawing tool, musical instrument and talisman.

The exhibition DRAWING POWER – Children of Compost explores the sometimes unsuspected power of drawing to act and reflect on current ecological issues. Drawing creates shapes and representations, diagrams and patterns, scenes and figures. We need these new representations to imagine differently, and thus change our role on the planet: the way we conceive of life is the way we realize it.

The exhibition TOUT UN FILM! presents a collection of specimens selected from the collections of La Cinémathèque Française, which mingle with the works from the artists’ workshops as well as the collections of their galleries. Our selection sheds light on the cross influence of these two arts, from storyboarding to the very material of the making of the film, celluloid.