Tessa Perutz: How to Map the Infinite

From October 7, 2023 to January 7, 2024, Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’art contemporain presents How to Map the Infinite, a monographic exhibition by Tessa Perutz.

Tessa Perutz’s artworks function as psychological landscapes, touring the fields and valleys of the Earth as well as the inner mind. Her works are a testimony to spontaneous exploration: sprinkled with anecdotes, hasty jottings and existential ponderings, Perutz’ oeuvre is shaped by processes of conceptualization and intuition, organically intertwining and informing one another. Paintings echo each other, mirroring seriality through repeated motifs and evocative use of colour. Encapsulating a mixed materiality, botanicals such as sand and lavender are incorporated for their healing and transformative properties.

The solo exhibition at Casino Luxembourg is the American artist’s first institutional show comprising paintings on canvas and paper mostly depicting European landscapes she studied and visited while living abroad. The exhibition combines existing works with new paintings including a large format study of Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera close to the French border. The artist aspired to follow in the steps of French Impressionist Claude Monet, entranced in her turn, by the same Mediterranean light and characteristic fauna and flora as the avant-garde had been, more than a century before.

As well as framed landscapes, a mural fresco represents the Marseille skyline as seen from one of the city’s renowned rooftops of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. By precisely summoning such locations, Perutz intends to revisit views of historically male academic practices—painting and architecture—through contemporary female artistic intuition and gaze. The floor of the exhibition spaces is covered with harvested lavender, as first shown in Brussels in 2019. Through creating a visual and olfactory environment, Tessa Perutz explores parallels between nature and humankind, referencing both personal and universal themes of connection and separation.

The exhibition is accompanied and complemented by a publication, a collection of edited texts from the artist’s diaries stemming from the period spent in Europe which are interspersed with poems accompanying carefully selected painting motifs. The publication is scheduled for Spring/Summer 2024.

Tessa Perutz (born in 1988 in Chicago; lives and works in New York) graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been included in many international exhibitions: The Drawing Center, New York; M HKA—Musée d’art contemporain, Antwerp; Baronian, Brussels and Knokke; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Stems Gallery, Brussels; Ruttkowski; 68, Paris and New York, and 3-D Foundation, Verbier. In 2022, she was artist in residence at the CAB Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The artist is represented by the Baronian gallery, Brussels.

Curator: Stilbé Schroeder, Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’art contemporain. Casino Luxembourg is financially supported by the Ministry of Culture, Luxembourg.