Adeline de Monseignat – Home
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Ronchini Gallery is pleased to present Home, an exhibition featuring new works by London-based Dutch-Monegasque artist Adeline de Monseignat. The exhibition, curated by Samia Calbayrac, explores the nostalgia of childhood memories through a large-scale installation that incorporates architecture, sculpture and drawing.
Created partly from red and white striped fabrics from the awnings of the artist’s family home, the installation is composed of a structure occupying the central space of the gallery. The work makes personal connections by replicating the exact dimensions of de Monseignat’s childhood bedroom and becomes an immersive space which visitors are able to enter. The reconstructed room responds to the playfulness of a child’s bedroom where imagination and creativity are untamed.
Inside the structure is an inner chamber that creates narrow corridors whose walls are the same height as the artist -1.70 meters. As visitors move through the installation they come to tactile sculptures created from fur encased in glass, which are set in an arrangement which pays homage to Louise Bourgeois’ marble sculpture Cumul, 1969. Referred to as ‘creaptures’, de Monseignat’s sculptures put into question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, appearing as something in between creatures and sculptures.
A series of black and white ink drawings on display connect to de Monseignat's installation; used to work out sculptural ideas, the drawings act as studies.
De Monseignat has cited her influences as including: René Magritte’s subversion of the natural, Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny and Louise Bourgeois' work which is heavily influenced by personal psychological events.
Curator and writer James Putnam, in discussing the artist’s work, states:
“With a strong grasp of Freud’s theory of The Uncanny, her work embraces themes of fertility, origin and the body [...] Placing the fur behind the surface of a glass sphere creates a desire to touch that remains potential rather than actual, thus setting up a curious tension where the viewer is invited to ‘touch’ with their eyes instead of with their hands.”
For de Monseignat the work has an afterlife within the space it occupies outside her studio. She explains:
“I investigate ways in which inanimate objects can trigger emotional responses and even hold a sense of presence in life. I attempt to inject this feeling of life into my sculptures by giving them a body, a soul and a story.”
About the artist
Adeline de Monseignat (b. 1987, Monaco) lives and works in London. She was awarded the Catlin Art Prize Visitor Vote (2012) and was long-listed for The Threadneedle Prize (2012). She studied at UCL (London), the Slade School of Fine Art and Parsons The New School, New York, before graduating with an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2011. In 2011 de Monseignat also held a solo show Reveal the Tension at the Norman Rea Gallery (York, UK), took part in Grand Rapid’s Art Prize (Michigan, US), and was awarded the Arcadia Missa Gallery Prize at the London Group’s Open Exhibition. Recent exhibitions include Galerie Im Regierungsviertel (Berlin, 2010), 20 Hoxton Square Projects (London, 2011), Sumarria Lunn and High House Gallery (London, 2012). In Summer 2012, de Monseignat was an artist-in-residence at Great Brampton House’s Down Stairs Gallery (Herefordshire, UK) and was invited as a guest speaker at Art Moscow to contribute to a talk organised and supported by Christie’s, Frameless Gallery and the British Council (Moscow, 2012), with a selection of her works on display. Ronchini Gallery exhibited her work alongside Berndnaut Smilde’s in an exhibition curated by James Putnam in early 2013.
