Aline Bouvy

1974 | Brussels, Belgium

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Aline Bouvy — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Portrait of Aline Bouvy

√ Accumulation √ Environment √ Installation √ Plaster √ Sculpture √ Human body √ Eroticism √ Feminism √ Irony √ Mannequins & dolls √ Spatial perception √ Belgium √ Europe √ 2000s √ 2010s √ 2020s √ 21st century

Luxembourgish multidisciplinary artist.

Aline Bouvy declares not to have a preferred medium. Yet with regards to her work, she and others have remarked: the exhibition becomes medium, the body becomes medium. This has undoubtedly been a subject of interest to her since childhood.
A. Bouvy did not grow up surrounded by books, but she did have two grandmothers who were housekeepers. One would bring the child to work to her cleaning jobs, in huge, film-set-like mansions, all white, chrome and smoked glass with ashtrays everywhere, and alongside them artworks. The other grandmother set her to creating DIY costumes, staging her own body, with gouache on old fabric scraps. Everything, almost, there. But it was in a library, via another love, that of a young boyfriend, that she finally discovered contemporary art, “real” art, and the sculptures of Bruce Nauman. There it was. That’s what I want to do, she told herself.

Between 1995 and 1999, A. Bouvy studied at the erg in Brussels, and from 1999 to 2001 at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She moved first to Berlin and then to London before returning to Brussels. Between 2000 and 2013 she worked in collaboration with John Gillis (born 1974) and co-founded the feminist collective The After Lucy Experiment.

All these instances of discovery and “first times” stimulated the development of a practice that is complex, critical and ironic, rendering A. Bouvy’s work a very personal tool for the simultaneous questioning of bodies, of spaces and of norms, always sur le fil, on the wire, as she puts it. If it leans one way or the other, it is perhaps more because of what the public projects onto it than anything else.

In each one of her projects a narrative unfolds, with A. Bouvy linking and rereading sources and archives with a feminist, and non-hierarchical eye. Links, rereadings, the pleasure of turning convention on its head: all are an important part of the preparatory work. Sometimes the works themselves are the fruits of collaboration with other bodies of work. Elements that are created for one context may be rearticulated in a new narrative.

In 2022 she presented her exhibition Cruising Bye at the Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand-Hornu. Here, walls had piercings and naked police officers flirted in bas-relief, circled by stray dogs who were just as excited as them. As a result, she won the prize for most outstanding exhibition from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

In Marseille in 2024 she filled the space of Triangle-Astérides with an anxiety-inducing white neutrality, almost too white, a signal as to its own cost, for her exhibition Le prix du ticket. In New York, at the Someday Gallery, she staged the exhibition Servant, clown or enemy, in which she exposed to the art world circus a white reproduction of her own body, which, despite being naked, vulnerable, and on a reduced scale – the size of a child or a dog – seems ready to bite.

A. Bouvy professes to have no preferred medium, but perhaps she favours nuances. Medium is, of course, the material and tools chosen by the artist, but it is also the centre, the neutral and its fiction, the white or blank parts of the conservation. It is substance, between thickener and diluter. A voice between low and high. It is a person, both central and intermediary, in communication with that which is almost no longer of this world. Or perhaps, the medium is the raised middle finger, raised in exasperation, in anger or in laughter. Is the artist giving us the middle finger? No … Gotcha!

Lætitia Paviani

Translated from the French by Flora Hibberd.

A biography produced as part of the +1 programme.