Anne Pigalle : L'Ame Erotique

About

The exhibition 'L'Ame Erotique' presents photographs and paintings that are reminiscent and influenced by cathartic religious ex-votos, where the ideas of hope and a better life prevail. Pigalle's votive images enact the relationship between a votary and holy person in a space where she paradoxically stands alone, herself the representation of what life accumulates over time.

Started in 2003, her use of a Polaroid camera to create unique and rare objects of desire was born out of the project to entice back a lost lover. Pigalle elaborately ordains her nude body and performs to her audience: the camera. Primarily, the Polaroids act as snap shots of her performance, but Pigalle then returns and intricately decorates each image until they become epitomes of feminine religious icons. She uses a collage palette of kitsch materials including nail polish, glitter, feathers and trinkets, all of which create this object quality of decadent sexual desire, entrevu but never decouvert.

The use of costumes and masks by Pigalle can be linked back to surrealist artist Claude Cahun and multi-disguised photographer Cindy Sherman; but rather than questioning her gender, she celebrates it in a freedom emulating Dada. She playfully adopts poses with a narcissistic, self-sufficient sexuality, whilst mimicking classical female art icons, such as Botticelli's Venus.

The Polaroid format, whilst offering an elusive closeness to forbidden fruit, introduces a voyeuristic, peepshow element to the images, a sensorial sphere itself highly ritualised. Throughout her works there is a sense of nostalgic burlesque, harking back to the Pigalle district of Anne's native Paris.

www.annepigalle.com

Organised by M van Fullbroeck Associates for muse@EIGHT.
Curated by Elvira Patruno.