ROCHECHOUART .- Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting the first exhibition of work in a museum by French artist Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann.
Le sentiment, la pensée, l’intuition * is palimpsest-like in its layers of rewritings, connections, poetic or psychological associations linked to the theme of interiors and spaces for living that constantly reverberate from room to room or between pieces. Extending through all eight of the museum’s second floor galleries, the exhibition builds up a sensitive vision of fictional domestic environments.
Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann’s exhibition offers visitors a world loosely inspired by the film The Man who fell to Earth (1976) by British film maker Nicolas Roeg. References abound to film and literature as she lithely slips between design, performance and plain face-value.
For all its cultural erudition, the exhibition never loses sight of the architecture and potential historical narratives of its surroundings in Rochechouart Castle. It provides a timeless journey into the mind, structured by unconscious thoughts, dreams and visions just like the film’s principal protagonist Thomas Jerome Newton (played by David Bowie).
Each gallery tells a story in miniature, moving through specific seasons and sentiments, from winter sitting room to summer lounge. The artist walks us through a gamut of forms, particularly those used in design and traditional crafts. Having mastered them, it is as if she can now strike out with bold experiments of her own, generating strong emotions in spectators.
The sculptural forms she uses appear to us simultaneously as elements of exhibition design, as full-blown sculptures and as convenient places to sit. Laetitia Badaut Haussmann has also chosen to include works from Rochechouart’s permanent collection, inserting them into the exhibition in order to open up further connections and associations; a body in waiting (John Coplans), infinite music (Katie Paterson), a disparition (Rachel Whiteread), a vocabulary of gestures (Raoul Hausmann), a tale (Kiki Smith), hidden desires (Danh Vo), a garden (Ettore Sottsass)
Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann was born in 1980 and now lives and works in Paris and London.
A graduate of ENSA Paris-Cergy School of Art in 2006, she went on to win the AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) 2017 prize. Amongst her numerous solo and collective exhibitions are included shows at Beeler Gallery (Columbus, Ohio, USA), Converso (Milano, IT), MRAC (Sérignan, FR), MUSEION (Bolzano, IT), MUDAM (Luxembourg, LUX), Maison Louis Carré (FR), Syntax (Lisbon, PT), FUTURA (Praha, CZ), Centre Pompidou (Metz and Paris, FR), Hepworth Wakefield (UK), CAC Passerelle (Brest, FR), La Galerie CAC (Noisy-Le-Sec, FR), Benaki Museum (Thessaloniki, GR), @KCUA Gallery (Kyoto, Japan).
Laetitia Badaut Haussmann is currently represented by the Allen Gallery, Paris.
*Title from Exploring the Unconscious Mind, an essay by Carl Gustav Jung.
