On the occasion of PhotoSaintGermain, the Beaux-Arts de Paris welcomes the artists Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Elsa and Johanna and Agnès Geoffray to discuss the presence of photography in contemporary art.
Round table moderated by Alain Berland.
Rather than a photographer, Pierre-Olivier Arnaud describes himself as an artist who reflects through photography. His works tirelessly question the nature of the image, its modes of production, distribution and consumption in the contemporary era. The photographs that he proposes on various, but most often modest, supports (posters, newspapers) are presented in the opposite direction from any spectacular effect and extend a reflection on the loss of the aura of the reproducible work. Taken from the urban or advertising space, these images of images are subject to multiple manipulations as well as to the prospect of their own disappearance.
Pierre-Olivier Arnaud (1972) is a graduate of the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Étienne. His work has been shown at the Mamco (Geneva, 2009), at the Institut d'Art Contemporain (Villeurbanne, 2015), at the Confort Moderne (Poitiers, 2015), at the Plateau (Paris, 2017), in 2021 he was welcomed in residence at the Secession, Vienne. Tombolo Presses is dedicating a monograph to him, which will be published in the autumn. His work is represented by the galleries Art: Concept, Paris and Skopia, Geneva.
Elsa & Johanna are a duo of visual artists, photographers and filmmakers. They met at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2014, where they were studying in parallel with their respective studies. Elsa was then a student at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, while Johanna studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, in the studio of Eric Poitevin. In 2015, they made a name for themselves with the self-portrait series A Couple of Them, in which they embodied fictional characters, occupying the roles of model, stylist, set designer and photographer at the same time. The work entered the collection of the Fonds d'acquisition d'art contemporain de la ville de Paris in 2018.
The staging of the self becomes a recurring theme in their personal work.
They were invited to the Salon de Montrouge in 2016, and were finalists for the HSBC Prize for Photography, then won the Picto Prize for Fashion in 2017. They were represented by Galerie La Forest Divonne the same year and have since exhibited at MAC VAL, Art Paris and Paris Photo, won the Prix du Public at the Festival de Hyères in the photography section in 2019 and were recently finalists for the Prix du Festival de Photographie d'Arles Louis Rœderer. They will open their first retrospective exhibition in 2021 until March 2022 at the Stadtische Galerie in Karlsruhe, Germany, where more than a hundred of the pair's works are on display.
The artist Agnès Geoffray was in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2002-2004), and a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome (2010).
Solo exhibitions at the Frac Auvergne, the Point du Jour, the Centre Photographique d'Île-de-France have accompanied group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou Paris, the Rencontres photographiques d'Arles, the Jeu de Paume, and the Mac Val.
She has exhibited abroad at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Centre de la photographie in Geneva, the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, among others.
She is represented by the Galerie Maubert in Paris and published by La Lettre volée in Brussels.
Four monographic works have been published by La Lettre volée: Ultieme Hallucinatie, Profond silence, Les Captives and Before the eye lid's laid.
Penser le Présent is supported by Société Générale.
Free entry subject to availability of seats
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