Noémie Goudal: Post Atlantica

Le Grand Café - contemporary art centre is delighted to present Noémie Goudal’s first solo exhibition in a French art centre since her notable exhibition at the BAL in 2016.

Different stories are intertwined in Noémie Goudal’s images, alternating the reality of the scientific references she’s inspired by with the artificiality of constructed scenes. Although the illusion appears perfect at first, the artist takes pains to leave visible clues that partially reveal the process of making the image. This doesn’t rob the image of its magic; on the contrary, by shunning special effects and photomontage software Noémie Goudal experiments with the empirical construction of an image on the spot, rooting fiction in the very heart of nature. The resulting landscapes lead us towards an indeterminate elsewhere.

At Le Grand Café, Noémie Goudal takes us on a vertiginous voyage through layers of time and space. The starting point for her new series Post Atlantica, presented in this exhibition, is scientific research into paleoclimatology. Her new video and photo installations all begin with a contemporary fascination for the extreme mutations of landscapes where geological time overtakes our experience. Tropical forests, mountains, deserts, etc. subjected to the force of natural elements like water or fire are any number of generic motifs for apprehending tomorrow’s changing climate.

In the exhibition Post Atlantica, the artist’s theatre of photography urges us to slow down as a way of trying to grasp, through the image, a chronological vertigo: the one inhabited by life’s principal players and their continuous evolution, imperceptible to the human eye.

Biography
Noémie Goudal was born in 1984, she lives and works in Paris.
She graduated from The Royal College of Arts (London) in 2010 and she was rewarded by HSBC in 2013.
Her work can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; FOAM Photography Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK, etc.

Solo shows (selection):
2021: Frieze London / Edel Assanti Gallery, October 13–17; Musée Delacroix, Paris, November
2019: Kunstverein Hildesheim, Germany; Exposure Award winner, Les Filles du Calvaire Gallery, Shanghai Photofair, China; Ballarat International Foto Biennale, The Art Gallery of Ballarat, Australia; Musée des beaux-arts, Le Locle, Switzerland
2018: Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden; The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland; Edel Assanti Gallery, London, UK
2017: Abbaye de Jumièges, France
2016: Le BAL, Paris

Recent collectives shows (selection):
2021: A Year of 13 Moons, Galerist, Istanbul, Turkey
2020: On Earth, Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France; Accelerate Your Escape: Gary Hume Explores the Hiscox Collection, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK
2019: Inner Space, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal; Alt+1000 Photography Festival, Switzerland; On Earth, Atelier des Forges, Les Rencontres d’Arles, France; Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria; Moonlight: 50 Years of Photographing the Moon, Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden; Korea International Photography Festival, Seoul, South Korea
2018: Loading… Works from the Foam collection, FOAM Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Elsewhere, Joseph Gross Gallery, University of Arizona, US

Curator: Sophie Legrandjacques, director of Le Grand Café – contemporary art centre
Press contact: anne samson communication, Federica Forte, federica [​at​] annesamson.com