PARIS.- Michel Rein gallery Paris/Brussels now represents the French-Swiss artist Agnès Thurnauer along with her first solo exhibition at the gallery in Paris in May 2020.

Through her paintings sculptures and installations Agnès Thumauer deals with the issue of language. In her pictorial praxis writing is often incorporated in the picture and even when it is not the allusive power released by the subject places the spectator within art history as in the endlessly renewed emancipation of its own reading. This plastic quality of language is tested in three dimensions with her sculptures made of casts of letters on differing scales permitting the involvement of the gaze and the body. For Agnès Thumauer the relation to the work always introduces a form of reciprocity. If the work reads the world it is up to each one of us to make our own reading thereof. For the artist this shared language lies at the heart of society and gives art a powerful poetic and political function.

Agnès Thumauer’s work was revealed to the public by a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo in 2003. Since then she has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou the Angers Museum of Fine Arts ditto in Nantes at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar and at the Château de Montsoreau-Collection Philippe Méaille among many other venues. She has also shown her work in Belgium at the SMAK in Ghent in the United States at the Seattle Art Museum and the Edgewood Gallery at Yale in Brazil at the CCBB in Rio and in many biennials and art centres: the Lyon Biennale the Cambridge Biennial the Kunsthalle Bratislava and the Yermilov center Kharkiev…

Agnès Thumauer works regularly with writers philosophers and poets for publications and artist’s books (Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Tiphaine Samoyault, Rod Mengham, Nicolas Donin…)

Her works are to be found in many private and public collections (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, Musée des Beaux-arts d’Angers, musée d’Unterlinden, FMAC, FRAC Bretagne, FRAC Auvergne, FRAC Ile de France…).
Her paintings and sculptures are currently on view in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar and at the Saint Denis Museum of Art and History. At the moment, she is working on a public commission for the installation of a monumental sculpture of 20 bronze Matrices at Ivry-sur-Seine. This will be followed by a solo show at the LaM in Villeneuve-d’Ascq (2021)

We talked for the first time with Agnès in 2012 around one of her works presented in the Atelier Rouart. Since then our paths have often crossed and we share many art world friends in common. A few months back we both had a desire to work together almost naturally. As meeting followed meeting with long hours spent in the studio and gallery our desire became something obvious. Agnès’s work fits perfectly into our programme. The œuvre is poetic open and generous and the visual qualities of the paintings and sculptures are incredible . --Michel Rein

Agnès Thumauer is also represented by Gandy Gallery in Bratislava