SANATORIUM presents Agnès Guillaume’s first solo exhibition in Turkey entitled ‘‘Let’s escape’’ between February 18, 2021 – April 9, 2021.
Agnès Guillaume’s pieces all have one thing in common, their style: Allusive, metaphorical, never realistic, but nevertheless connected to an existential reality. As Paul Ardenne stated, her works tend to reflect on the fact of existence and thinking through life by asking: Do we ever know if we have taken the right direction? How do we exist and on what? On love, adversity, resistance, letting go? On the fear and focus that our mortal fate brings to bear on our actions? On the imagination in which we take refuge?
With ‘‘Let's Escape’’, the artist aims to push this meditative state into two different directions; an invitation to self-reflect and an invitation to escape the reality. While questioning thoroughly what it means to be human, especially in terms of the psyche, the artist uses various elements of nature in her pieces such as water, sand, rocks, wind, and light that are all mixed with unrecognizable bodily forms to open the door into this meditative state.
As an escape of the tangible and against any kind of certitude or single mindset, the exhibition is a call to come back to reality with a more open-mind, critical, and personal gaze.
About the artist:
Agnès Guillaume (1962) a former musician turned to video art in 2010. She produces videos, mixed media works and embroideries. The artist’s videos function as poetic forms that think self-awareness. Receiving a growing international recognition, Agnès Guillaume's work has been shown in different venues such as the Petit Palais - Fine Arts Museum of the City of Paris, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Nuit Blanche 2020, Videoforme and Art Brussels, It can be found in a number of public and private collections. Agnès Guillaume lives between Paris and Brussels.
“In her videos, as well as in her embroideries, Agnès Guillaume speaks only of us, humans. Not an abstract, transcendent, invented humanity, giving substance to an idealised conception of our condition. Humans who are all too human, in Nietzsche’s phrase… In the age of speed, the permanent state of acceleration that we live in, this type of visual endeavour nails its colours to the mast: art is an idiom that demands and deserves attention.” Paul Ardenne, Art historian and writer
“Video art is to short films what poetry is to novels: narrative gives way to the visionary” Christophe Leribault, Director of the Petit Palais Fine Arts Museum of the City of Paris