L’homme nu brings together sculpture, objects, photography, and wall pieces which communicate ideas of physical support and aesthetic presentation. These works are therefore forms ‘in the service of’. They are means and ways designed for the presentation and the usage of other objects and living beings (underwear, cigars, baguettes, cats, towels, postcards, photographs). For Deborah Bowmann however, these secondary forms are the principal focus of our attention. [...]
A Deborah Bowmann collaboration with Laurent Le Deunff, Still Making Art (Aaron Mc Laughlin and Simon Boase), Laure Jaffuel, Joey O’Doherty, Fabien Vallos, Victor Delestre, Amaury Daurel and Lucas Furtado
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Deborah Bowmann Amsterdam, its representatives and Deborah Bowmann herself have the pleasure of presenting their new collection L’homme nu – a collaboration with Laurent Le Deunff, Still Making Art (Aaron Mc Laughlin and Simon Boase), Laure Jaffuel, Joey O’Doherty, Fabien Vallos, Victor Delestre and Amaury Daurel.
L’homme nu brings together sculpture, objects, photography, and wall pieces which communicate ideas of physical support and aesthetic presentation. These works are therefore forms ‘in the service of’. They are means and ways designed for the presentation and the usage of other objects and living beings (underwear, cigars, baguettes, cats, towels, postcards, photographs). For Deborah Bowmann however, these secondary forms are the principal focus of our attention.
Porte-baguette, towel rails, cat trees and cigar holders are presented naked, deprived of the fates they were destined for. This nudity acts like an unveiling of their sculptural qualities – simplifying them, extracting them from the signifiers of their functions and thus liberating them from their destiny. Neither preconceived as nor forced to become artworks, sculptures and objects presented in L’homme nu can be thought of as characters whose destiny is uncertain, means without ends whose nature hesitates between artwork and functional object. Still Making Art’s presentation Stijl Making Art is a composition of climbing grips is conceived as a functional object whose use value is limited due to its visual qualities. Poster pour L’homme nu, created by graphic designer Émilie Ferrat, is a series of empty frames still in their plastic, denying their use has ever occurred.
L’homme nu offers a landscape of display, where function and decoration dance together. The relation to physical support is treated sometimes purely aesthetically and sometimes purely functionally, causing an unsteady oscillation between ergonomy, exaggeration and illustration.
The exhibition deploys a range of displays in order to spark a dynamic discussion around use value and exhibition value. Laurent Le Deunff’s Cat Trees are forms of supportive platforms rather than presentations themselves. Contrasting the minimalism of the former, Joey Doherty’s Porte-cigare takes a monumental form and wildly exaggerates its supposed function. Vitally, it is in this relation of one artwork to another that the relationship between use and exhibition value is made more complex and precarious.
As such, the composite features of this landscape presented in L’homme nu are of varying and diverse nature. Whilst Amaury Daurel’s Étude pour la suppression de la réalité resembles a mass-produced postcard rack, it is in fact built carefully by hand. Exploring an alternate tangent, Laure Jaffuel’s Porte-serviettes are artisanal objects, which reference a history of minimalist sculpture. Unlike previous Deborah Bowmann shows, which followed a logic of collection and series, the new exhibition celebrates non-cohesion, the jarring between individual pieces softened and nuanced by a discursive relation and common formats. Some works seem to emerge from domestic habitats, whilst others reference a purely commercial space; resulting in a gathering of characters, who have been stripped of their contexts and whose affinities and vocabularies differ.