Mathilde Rosier

1973 — Paris, France

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Mathilde Rosier — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Portrait of Mathilde Rosier, © Mathilde Rosier

French visual artist and performer.

Mathilde Rosier mainly works with painting, video and performance. After studies at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she made a brilliant start within the art world, she began sharing her time between the city and the countryside, withdrawing to reflect on nature and agriculture. She then lived and worked in Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles, before settling in Berlin for almost a decade. During those years, she was part of the conceptual and political art scene, sharpening her analytical facilities. M. Rosier moved back to France, to Burgundy in 2015, where she continues her reflection on exterior and inner lives.
M. Rosier’s subjects and concerns have been constant through the years, including: nature and its agency; the possibility of inventing new mythologies in order to produce new worlds; the correspondences that exist between the human mind, the mind of nature and the unconscious mind; the possibilities of connecting ancient and contemporary ways of knowing. Her work is animated by deep, meticulous research on rituals, ancient ways of connecting with the living, desire understood as the desire to care, agriculture and the many ways humans keep nature hostage, non-binary thinking and the importance of constantly maintaining an awareness of all living creatures and their needs. All these problematics cohabit in her paintings and small theater pieces.

In her most recent works she addresses the agency of cultivated fields and creates human-like-grains that appear in her paintings (Portrait en pied, 2023) and in her films (Le massacre du printemps, 2020). They dance across the skies of our cities, or simply appear in unexpected architectures. In certain paintings, the heads of creatures become arrows, pointing to the skies, while somehow mocking our continual need for “ups”, for development, for progress. After centuries together, we are not really surprised that those grains appear in front of us. They are not wild, or rebellious … not yet. The works portray a phase in which these creatures seem to just have gained consciousness and presence, and the necessary courage to just be in front of us. They are silent yet at the same time eloquent. We know that we can no longer maintain the boundaries that divide domesticated from wild. In fact, both these states have disappeared. That is what these beings say to us. There is no wild, raw, savage life. But domesticated life also needs to change. Are these grains talking to us? They are talking to the impulse that wants and fights for the absolute control of life and its intelligence. A huge part of humankind still believes we can win all the battles. It took hundreds and hundreds of years to domesticate nature. Now it is time to also domesticate the inorganic, the artificial.

Lately, eyes are also appearing in her work, as in the installation Champs de vision (2023). The beautiful glass eyes, made of water, are the eyes of all living creatures looking back at humans. These eyes channel all the emotions that non-human entities feel about the atrocities we constantly commit.

Since 2016 she has been a lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature at the HGK in Basel. She has had solo shows at the Camden Art Centre, London; Museum Abteiberg,Mönchengladbach; Serpentine Galleries, London; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and most recently at the Madre Museum, Naples (2020) and the Fondation Pernod Ricard,Paris (2023) as well as a site-specific commission for the Centre de conservation et de ressources (CCR) of the Mucem in Marseille (2023).

Chus Martínez