Anne Deguelle
Anne Deguelle, © photo: Yves Morelle
Anne Deguelle, Marcel Duchamp et la bouteille de Bénédictine, ed. Musée Calbet / Printemps de septembre, September 13–November 10, 2018
→Anne Deguelle, Sigmund’s rug, ed. Freud Museum/Archibooks, November 16, 2011-January 15, 2012
→Anne Deguelle, Abbey road, ed. Filigranes / Centre d’art Abbaye de Maubuisson, November 1, 2005-April 30, 2006
→Anne Deguelle, X/Beuys, Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, 26 September, 2004 – 9 January, 2005
Anne Deguelle, Marcel Duchamp et la bouteille de Bénédictine, Musée Calbet-Grisolles, le Printemps de septembre, 13 September – 10 Noember, 2018
→Allégories d’oubli, Le nouveau Festival, Centre Georges Pompidou MNAM Paris, February 19 -March 10, 2014
→Anne Deguelle, Sigmund’s Rug, Freud Museum London, November 16, 2011–January 15, 2012
→Anne Deguelle, X/Beuys, Weserburg museum für moderne kunst, Bremen, September 26, 2004–Janurary 9, 2005
French visual artist.
The career of artist-researcher Anne Deguelle, whose practice can be linked to the conceptual movement, has been eclectic. Since the late 1980s she has constantly explored different media, from painting and photography to video and installations. Her work takes shape through empirical and deductive questions and analyses that amplify the dimension of overlooked details.
She studied at the Duperré School of Applied Arts in Paris. In 1987-1988 she began a series of paintings inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and its linguistic construction: the chiasmus, a figure of poetic discourse, is summed up in the suspended sacredness of the symbol X. Attentive to the construction of form, she analyses it by highlighting potential discrepancies with its content. The result is Diplopies, a series of juxtaposed identical photographs, first landscapes (1992-1996) then portraits (1996-1998).
The inevitable confrontation generates doubts about the real possibility of duplication, and implicitly about photography’s ability to capture a reality that is not immutable. Her double portraits of great figures of art and literature in their youth confront the viewer with becoming, proposing a Bergsonian reading of time through photography. From the late 1990s onwards A. Deguelle re-analysed the work of art icons, first Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), then Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). With her postmodern approach, she dissects the elusive aspects of each: she explores the legendary and poetic character of the first, for example, by creating a battery from two lemons (Lemon Time, 1994).
Later she showed a brilliant work on the reception of J. Beuys’s work at the Weserburg Museum in Bremen, Germany. M. Duchamp’s enigmatic, detached and ironic work would become the most sought-after in her research.
During her residency at Villa Vincelli-Abbaye Bénédictine, Fécamp, in 2002, she conducted research that led to the exhibition Anne Deguelle, Marcel Duchamp et la bouteille de Bénédictine, Musée Calbet-Grisolles, le Printemps de septembre, accompanied by a book published by Editions Calbet the same year.
A. Deguelle approached the Large Glass by exploring historical documents in the Palais Bénédictine distillery, and by creating a system of notes that, alongside the Green Box, would be stored in metal cases, symbolising the work of investigation. These bodies of work led her to deploy her work in space in several registers, from notes to the installation, demonstrating a great curiosity for very different fields, from art to psychology (around Sigmund Freud, thanks to which she will have a residency at the Freud Museum in London in 2010), from literature (James Joyce, Raymond Roussel) to the natural sciences.
Using the same empirical approach, in the 2000s she produced a number of works on the cosmos and the human environment, constructing a kind of archaeological and ethnological study of the self, a work in progress titled Diary.
