Pauline Curnier Jardin
Illustrations inspired by legends and landmarks of Margate
2020
Pauline Curnier Jardin employs an excessive vocabulary of characters and forms to confuse the distinction between the sacred and the profane, with a penchant for dirty details. For Nothing gentle will remain, the artist continues her exploration of myths and absurd religious traditions with a series of new illustrations inspired by the legends and landmarks of Margate, from the enigmatic Shell Grotto to the old cartographies of Thanet.
Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) works across installation, performance, film and drawing. Through compelling and immersive filmic installations, her work evokes a delirious circus, an unsettling experience based on the confusion of time. She has explored different forms of expanded narratives, such as an optic-opera, an ethnographic peep show, and some film performances, often working with the same troupe of dancers, performers and costume and set designer Rachel Garcia. Pauline graduated from ENSAPC, Paris-Cergy, and from Linköping Swedish University with an MFA in Art & Technologies, and is a former resident of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Recent projects and performances include: the 57th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; Performa 15, New York; Museum of Modern Art of Paris, Palais de Tokyo; GP&N Vallois Gallery, Paris; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, PSM Gallery, Berlin; FUTURA, Prague; and Museum of Contemporary, USP São Paulo. She was nominated for the Fondation Ricard Prize in 2017 and won the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2019. Pauline is based in Rome and Berlin.
Texts by Lydia Antoniou, Caterina Guadagno, Nora Kovacs, Titus Nouwens and William Rees