GATESHEAD.- BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead announces a major survey exhibition of Caroline Achaintre with new and recent work. It is the artist’s largest and most significant exhibition to date.
Achaintre works across a diverse range of media that includes watercolours, linocuts, textiles and ceramics. Her drawings, hand-tufted wall hangings and sculptures are colourful and potent, evoking the subversive spirit of European carnival and creating an atmosphere that is both playful and absurd. Including German Expressionism, modernist sculpture and Primitivism among her influences, the artist also references more contemporary subcultural genres such as sci-fi, the heavy metal scene, cartoons and horror films.
Drawing is the foundation of Achaintre’s practice. Made with watercolour and ink, the artist’s delicate works on paper oscillate between the abstract and the figurative, revealing compositions that often recall the shape of a face or figure, like a series of ghostly portraits. Recent works use latex, wax and bleach to mask out patterns and remove colour. Monochromatic linocuts refer more directly to the primitive, with heavy expressive lines and shadowy forms.
Achaintre’s richly-coloured textile wall hangings embody characters or beings. The artist uses a tufting gun to shoot woollen threads through a canvas stretcher, a labour-intensive technique borrowed from 1970s’ shag pile carpets. The length, texture and colour of the thread takes on the qualities of an expressionist painting and evokes an eerie, uncanny domesticity. Achaintre likens the process of making these textile works to ‘painting with wool’. Each work has a distinct personality, often alluded to in the title.
Taking the form of playful ceramic masks or helmets, the artist’s wall and plinth-based sculptures are made from fired and glazed paper clay. The process of making is spontaneous; a quick gesture of gathering the clay into a crude facial expression or grimace. The surfaces are glossy and seductive, emulating materials such as snakeskin or crocodile skin and evoking notions of the exotic. Together with the tufted works, these ceramic sculptures explore ideas around animism, otherness and the carnivalesque.
Achaintre’s survey exhibition at BALTIC will comprise a selection of work from the last decade together with new work including a large-scale textile piece, ceramic sculptures and watercolours. The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first monograph co-published by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and FRAC – Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Champagne-Ardenne, Reims including scholarly essays by Anne Dressen, Curator at ARC/Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Zoë Gray, Senior Curator at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels and a conversation between the artist and BALTIC Curator Emma Dean.
CAROLINE ACHAINTRE was born in Toulouse in 1969 and spent her formative years in Germany studying Fine Art at Kunsthochschule in Halle (Saale) (1996-98), with her postgraduate studies in Fine Art and Combined Media at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1998-2000) and in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London (2001-03). She trained as a blacksmith before coming to London, where she now lives and works.
Recent exhibitions include: boo, c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, Brussels (2016); Limbo, Arcade, London (2016); British Art Show 8, organised by Hayward Touring (2015-17); BP Spotlight at Tate Britain, London (2015); Present/Future Illy Art Prize, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Rivoli, Turin (2014); Camp Coo, University of Hertfordshire Galleries and Smith Row, Hertfordshire and Bury St. Edmunds (2013); DEEDIE, The Showroom, London (2005); Quarters, Whitechapel Project Space, London (2004). In 2014, Achaintre was artist in residence at Camden Arts Centre, London.
