LA CHAUX-DE-FONDS.- This monographic exhibition, which is held on the first floor and basement of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de- Fonds, in a series of eight rooms covering almost 800 m2, is the first monographic exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to Agnès Thurnauer, offering an overview of her work and highlighting her major contributions to contemporary art.
The display of nearly 80 works, paintings and sculptures, highlights the different aspects of Agnès Thurnauer’s work through a multidimensional approach, with her Prédelles taking center stage, tracing a “grand poem” throughout the exhibition, while at the same time engaging in an extended dialogue with her other series. A tribute to an artist who, for decades, has questioned the role of women in art, language and society, while proposing new forms of narrative and re-presentation and constantly redefining the limits of painting and language.
Agnès Thurnauer paints words. Meticulously tracing letters with a brush isn’t really writing: the word becomes an object, you can feel its thickness, you can cut it in two. You can repeat it, as children do, until it peels away its common meaning to become a strange vocable. This is the beginning of poetry. It’s a contemplative process that allows words to emerge with new meanings. It’s a contemplative process, in keeping with the slowness with which a painting is made. Tightening the focus even further, Agnès Thurnauer even cuts out letters, or rather their negatives, to isolate abstract forms, like an unknown and therefore silent alphabet. For silence is the intimate flip side of this poetry. The artist cuts out oblong, distantly anthropomorphic shapes, which she places in the foreground of the canvas. It’s as if mute beings were looking at a painting together, setting an example, helping viewers to plunge into a mise en abîme. For Agnès Thurnauer shows above all the painter’s gestures. Even cloud-laden skies are reminiscent of the old masters: they are brushstrokes, color and style. By associating them with the word “now”, the artist reminds us that art is an immediate experience rather than a history. The story itself could have been written differently, with feminine rhymes for example. But sensitive reality can only be experienced in the present. We’re a long way from love from afar. -- David Lemaire conservateur – directeur
Franco-Swiss artist. Born in Paris in 1962, works in Ivry-sur-Seine.
A graduate of the École nationale des arts décoratifs in 1985, Agnès Thurnauer is a visual artist whose work explores the relationship between painting and language. Since the 1990s, she has been investigating the connections between semantic material, representation, and space, incorporating writing into her work across a range of media that probe its plasticity—painting, sculpture, collage, installations, among others. Her practice unfolds through open-ended series that echo and converse with one another, interweaving figuration and abstraction, text and image, through distinctive techniques and approaches, in a highly performative relationship to the pictorial space.
Her «Big-Big» and «Bang-Bang» series renew our encounter with the artwork; her Portraits Grandeur Nature question the visibility and recognition of women artists within the recent history of art; her Peintures d’histoires— fusing image and text invite fresh readings of iconic paintings; her Prédelles offer the canvas space to be read like an open book; and her Matrices invite the viewer’s body to physically engage with the spatiality of letters. For Agnès Thurnauer, the relationship to an artwork always implies a form of reciprocity. Language, which underpins most of her series, is the backbone of her practice, as it forms the basis of our connection to others whether intimate or societal. If the artwork reads the world, it is up to each of us to produce our own reading. This shared language lies at the heart of society and bestows upon art a potent poetic and political function.
In 2020, Agnès Thurnauer installed a permanent work, Matrices Chromatiques, at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, followed in 2021 by a major public commission from the French Ministry of Culture in the urban landscape of Ivry-sur-Seine. Since 2022, she has had four solo exhibitions, notably at the LAM Museum in Villeneuve d’Ascq and the Matisse Museum in Nice. In the autumn of 2024, her work was presented at the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris and at the National Museum of World Writing Systems in South Korea.
In 2025, Agnès Thurnauer is the subject of solo exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux Arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland and the Musée Cognacq- Jay in Paris. A catalogue has been published for the occasion by Paris Musées, featuring texts by Saskia Ooms, Marie Gaitzsch, Martine Lacas, and Eva Belgherbi.
A new monograph tracing 30 years of her artistic journey has just been released by JRP Ringer, with essays by Cécile Debray, Dean Daderko, Lorenzo Benedetti, and Elisabeth Lebovici. Finally, a 400-page volume of her Notes from the Studio, with a foreword by Tiphaine Samoyault, will be published in June 2025 by Éditions L’Atelier Contemporain.
