PARIS.- The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is presenting the dazzling work of American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958–1981). Rooted in constant exploration of herself and the medium, Woodman’s insightful, deeply intimate approach turned her photography into a second skin. In her images she made almost exclusive use of her own body: It’s a matter of convenience, she explained, I’m always available. Despite her premature passing at the age of twenty-two, Woodman left an impressive body of work. And while the pictures betray a host of influences ranging from Symbolism to Surrealism, her own talent was as prodigious as it was precocious.
Francesca Woodman has grown up in an artist family in Colorado and starts photographying at the age of thirteen, when she receives a camera from her father. From 1969, the family travels a lot in Italy and her parents acquire a house near Florence. The country, its culture and the language will be a true inspiration for the artist who will later travel back to Rome for a student exchange program. In 1975 and after attending a photography class at public school, she enters Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. At the end of her studies, Francesca Woodman moves to New York where she briefly photographed in color borrowing codes and preps from fashion photography. In 1980, the artist spent two months at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Later, during a stay in Rome, she purchases old Italian exercise books at the Maldoror bookshop. One of them, dedicated to geometry and specifically Euclid’s theorem became the foundation of her first publication of which the hand-written title says a lot about her clearsightedness: Some Disordered Interior Geometries. This pamphlet was released a few days before she commits suicide in January 19, 1981.
Francesca Woodman explores her own image although her inspiration drives her to navigate into the photographic technic and the act of writing. Her staging in desolated rooms, the ghostly body presence in the middle of spaces in decay, of houses on the threshold of demolition outreached the pure self-portrait genre. Preps and setups disclose assumed surrealist influences, glasses, mirrors, peeling paint, ripped wallpaper. The body is to be fiddled with, fragmented until mingling with its environment and raises issues about metamorphosis and genre. These insolent and disconcerting images of a rare intensity arouse the ephemeral, the elusiveness of time.
The artist photographs are part of international museum collections such as the Tate Modern in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The first travelling exhibition of her works has been organized in 1986 and her main European exhibitions in the 90’s. La Fondation Cartier and Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles have been the first and last institutions to present a retrospective of her work in France, in 1998.
The exhibition including a hundred prints, video and documents has been organized in collaboration with the Estate of Francesca Woodman in New York and Anna Tellgren, the curator. After the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and FOAM in Amsterdam, the European tour of the exhibition will end up at the Moderna Museet in Malmö.
The book Francesca Woodman – Devenir un ange is published in France by the Éditions Xavier Barral in conjunction with the exhibition. After a foreword by Agnès Sire, the Fondation HCB director, the publication proposes three essays written by Anna-Karin Palm, a swedish novelist, Anna Tellgren curator and George Woodman, the artist father.
