Susanna Fritscher: Promenade Blanche / Weisse Reise
Jean-Christophe Norman: Biographie
18 October 2014–25 January 2015
Frac Franche-Comté
Cité des arts
2 passage des arts
25000 Besançon
France
contact [at] frac-franche-comte.fr
www.frac-franche-comte.fr
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The Fonds régional d’art contemporain (French Regional Contemporary Art Fund, Frac) Franche-Comté is playing host to two solo shows: Promenade Blanche / Weisse Reise by Susanna Fritscher and Biographie by Jean-Christophe Norman, two artists with different approaches but brought together here through their common interest in time and space, body and movement, as well as the notions of layers, perception and revelation.
Known for her subtle, ethereal offerings that spark a dialogue with architecture, the Austrian-born artist brings to the Frac Franche-Comté a series of new works produced especially for the occasion: installations, sound pieces, sculptures and drawings form a sensitive body of work playing on transparency, colour and light. Susanna Fritscher’s early artistic achievements evolved out of painting work on various materials (glass, Perspex, plastic film, shimmering surfaces) or directly on the wall. The colour white, in all its variations, has from the outset marked a radical stance that the artist remains true to today. But her work now also extends to colour and experimentation with other materials. In Promenade Blanche / Weisse Reise (1) not only is the sound dimension very much in evidence, as in her recent voice works Peintures Vocales, but so is the importance of the body; not only that of the visitor encouraged to immerse himself in diaphanous and at times “rustling” installations, urged to experience them physically while his bearings are swayed, but also the body as origin of the pieces and as source of an invisible energy that the artist tends to convey in audible or tangible form.
Body and movement are likewise concerns in the work of Jean-Christophe Norman, an artist who lives and works in Besançon. The Frac is playing host to his first major solo exhibition with the aim of showing the multiplicity of forms he has experimented with since the beginning of his artistic career and the scope of his artistic research. Jean-Christophe Norman first came to notice for his “performative” practice that may be described as “infiltrative,”(2) discreet or “furtive,”(3) with his walks in different cities around the world. Then there were his memorable marks on the ground charting the course of time as displayed on his digital watch—walking now as a metaphor for life, with the written script as biography—and, in particular, his verbatim reproduction of Joyce’s Ulysses copied out on the ground of the cities he walked through or on the wall panels of exhibition spaces. The Frac’s initiative is to disclose other aspects of his work that find simultaneous expression across a wide range of media (photographs, videos, books or paintings). Here he seeks to reveal images buried under layers of graphite, to conjure up unlikely maps or to convey a memory of landscapes through light. A multifaceted and coherent body of work that evokes the passing of time as well as the fusion between the time of one work and that of one life…
Curated by Sylvie Zavatta, Director of Frac Franche-Comté
The Fonds régional d’art contemporain of Franche-Comté is one of the 23 Frac created in 1982 to disseminate contemporary art within each region of France. The Frac have three complementary missions: to collect the art of our times, to take it out into the public, and to educate people about art. The Frac Franche-Comté builds and manages a public collection of contemporary art which is the unique significant collection of its kind in the Franche-Comté Region, assembling 572 works by 291 artists including Marina Abramovic, Rosa Barba, Christian Boltanski, Robert Breer, Balthasard Burkhard, Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, Manon de Boer, Simon Faithfull, Cyprien Gaillard, Mario Garcia Torrès, Shilpa Gupta, Julius Koller, Didier Marcel, Christian Marclay, Xavier Veilhan, Raphaël Zarka.
The Frac opened the doors of its new building designed by Kengo Kuma within the Cité des Arts in Besançon, France on 2013.
(1) Title taken from a film by Werner Schroeter, described by one critic as a “round-the-world tour in a room”
(2) In the words of Alain-Martin Richard (Non et non lieux de l’art actuel (Places and non-places of contemporary art), in Les Editions Esse, 2005).
(3) Term employed by Sylvette Babin in the same volume.
Press contact
Domna Kossyfidou: T +33 (0) 3 81 87 87 50 / domna.kossyfidou [at] frac-franche-comte.fr
