Isabelle Cornaro

From May 26, 2024, to July 14, 2024, Today Art Museum presents the first major institutional solo exhibition in Asia of French artist Isabelle Cornaro.

Curated by Damien Zhang, this exhibition features a panoramic display of 27 works across four major series, showcasing Cornaro’s iconic large-scale sculptural installations and her explorations in painting and video. The exhibition reviews over a decade of the artist’s creative career and includes a newly completed, large-scale special commissioned site-specific installation being unveiled for the first time.

The exhibition opens with Cornaro’s early photographic series Savane autour de Bangui et le fleuve Utubangui, created in 2007. In this series, Cornaro positions her mother’s jewelry and trinkets on wooden panels. The curved forms of those jewelry and trinkets intertwine with the wood grain to evoke the natural scenery of the Central African Republic, where Cornaro partly spent her childhood. While attempting to question the boundaries between the everyday objects, the ornamental, and the artistic, Cornaro also contemplates the legacy of Western colonization and Africa’s resource exploitation through the notion of “landscape”. 

The two new installations unveiled for this exhibition stem from the artist’s renowned Paysages series. With an academic background in art history, Cornaro reignited her fascination with the principles of arrangement, composition, and assemblage intrinsic to classical Western painting, reminiscent of her earlier exploration of her mother’s jewelry. She further recognizes that these concerns lie beyond the pictorial frame to the storage and display mechanisms in Western museums. The perspective within the frame and the position of the audience are both matters of perspective, which is essentially a matter of “authority”: these choices determine what, where and how we look.

The Reproductions series delves deeply into the realm of image reproduction, a theme echoed in the artist’s films and the seamless transitions among various mediums. In Cornaro’s films, familiar elements from her Landscape installations can be spotted. The exhibition also showcases five large-scale paintings from Reproductions, which depict enlarged stills from the same films, reminiscent of the history of abstraction. Towards the exhibition’s conclusion, a series titled Séquence, prompting contemplation on the concept of “seriality”, wherein each piece contributes to a broader imagery. As these works are arranged and combined, they gradually unfold into a panoramic vista, underscoring similar principles from image scanning and film editing.

2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France, the exhibition is one of the important exhibitions of the 18th Festival Croisements, builds a bridge of cultural exchanges between China and France through art. Under Jessica Zhang’s leadership in recent years, Today Art Museum has continuously fostered dialogues and interactions to promote a long-lasting development of China-France culture. On May 25th, at the opening of the exhibition, Nicolas Pillerel, Minister Counselor for Cultural, Educational, and Scientific Affairs of the French Embassy in China, awarded Jessica Zhang, Director of Today Art Museum, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an honor in the field of French arts and literature. This award recognizes Jessica Zhang’s outstanding contributions to promoting French and global culture in the arts and acknowledges her efforts in fostering cultural and artistic exchanges between China and France.

In his speech, Nicolas Pillerel emphasized that Isabelle Cornaro’s exhibition represents the revival of cultural exchanges between the two countries. He also invited visitors to discover the diversity of Cornaro’s works and her tribute to the Chinese painting tradition throughout this exhibition showing installations, sculptures, videos, and more.

Today Art Museum 
Today Art Museum (TAM) is a contemporary art museum dedicated to providing a comprehensive platform and serving as a bridge to connect artists, the public, and interdisciplinary institutions. “Art & Technology”, “Art & Design”, and “Contemporary Art” are three focuses for our future exploration. TAM was the first museum to receive non-profit status in mainland China in 2002, and stands by its foundations in innovation and social impact through art.