Through a multimedia approach, Pauline Curnier Jardin's work seeks a unique representational logic, in order to locate a separation between reality and fiction, rationality and emotion, man and woman, friend and enemy, human and objects, the sacred and the profane.
Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) is an Rome-Berlin based artist working across installation, performance, film and drawing. The transgressive, camp, and idiosyncratic character-driven work of Curnier Jardin takes on a diversity of forms ranging from paintings, performances, musical collaborations, installations and films. In her work the artist often incorporates historical or mythological material into her own bizar aesthetics. With the instruments of the theater, she breathes new life into anthropological objects, discoveries, and images. She reinterprets such objects as altruistic protagonists in her self-created, peculiar adventures. She is especially interested in the female figure in mythology, history, folklore, and cinema. She deconstructs stereotypical representations of women as hallow, witch, mother, or mystic. Through a multimedia approach, her work seeks a unique representational logic, in order to locate a separation between reality and fiction, rationality and emotion, man and woman, friend and enemy, human and objects, the sacred and the profane.
Curnier Jardin completed a residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam in 2015-2016. She was the winner of the Dutch prize NN Award (2018) and laureate of the Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (2017). She was a visiting tutor at the Dutch Art Institute and at Kunsthochschule Kassel and has been tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam for the past year. She is the winner of the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie and recipient of the 2019/2020 Villa Medici Residency in Rome and the 2021 Villa Romana Fellows in Florence.
Selected solo and group exhibitions, commissioned projects and screenings include: Hot Flowers, Warm Fingers, Centraal Museum, Utrecht; 57th Venice Biennale, IT; Tate Modern, London; UK; Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, NL; International Film Festival, Rotterdam, NL; Video Art At Midnight; Berlin, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, DE; Futura, Prague, CZ; Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, NL (2018). Performa 15, New York, US; The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, FR; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich, CH; University of São Paulo, São Paulo, BR (2015). MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, US (2014). Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2013). Centre George Pompidou, Paris, FR (2012). Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, FR; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, DE (2010).