KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Cynthia Girard

Tous les oiseaux sont ici

Cynthia Girard’s painting consciously avoids notions such as professionalism and academically schooled virtuosity. Her pictures and installations are narratives about painting itself, in which she concerns herself with questions of representation and with overcoming the conflict between abstraction and figuration, between purely formal and narrative depictions. By appropriating elements of Minimal, Hard-Edge, Op-Art or Neo-Expressionism in her works and blending them with influences from folk art, applied art, children’s book illustration and Outsider-Art, Girard questions the customary hierarchies of contemporary art.

Her paintings and sculptures often function like components of a stage and extend the painterly composition into a spatial experience. “Tous les oiseaux sont ici”, for example, resembles an imaginary stage play in which the gigantic painting of a stylised prison wall divides the studio into two zones. In her space-consuming installation, Girard conveys various dialectical meanings through the motif of the prison: it is a metaphor of the restrictive delineations of pictorial space, of a voluntarily chosen place of retreat, of the position of a social outsider, or it is emblematic of conventional perception, from which the aim is to escape.

At approximately 8 pm on the opening evening, Cynthia Girard will slip into a paper snake costume and recite her own poems as part of a Poetry-Performance in the exhibition.

Exhibition
02.05. – 17.05.2009
Tue - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
30.04.2009
7 - 10 pm

Cynthia Girard holds a fellowship from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Ministère des Relations internationales du Québec.

Studio 2, Bethanien