A former student of the School of Fine Arts in Bourges and a successor to conceptual art, Anne-Marie Jugnet makes extensive use of words, exploring their formal dimensions in order to access their meaning. She selects snippets of sentences, which she then uses to inspire the imagination of the viewer. Her works are often site-specific, like À perte de vue [As Far as the Eye Can See, 1991], a neon piece suspended above the courtyard of a building and drawing attention to the infinity of sky behind it. While neon – on the verge of what is visible and invisible – and light are the main elements in her work, she is also known to use slide projection, video, painting, and drawing. In 1997, she began an artistic collaboration with Alain Clairet, who was at the time a writer and historian. Their work focuses on the edges of the image, on the exploration of its limits, its appearance, its representations, and its disappearance, focusing on subjects as varied as the desert and television static noise. The couple created their series Switch (2001) in motels in the American West – they have since settled in New Mexico. The series consists of paintings of television screens marked with the dot of light that lingers in the middle of a TV screen when it is switched off. They sculpt what is “almost nothing”, creating marble clouds (2006) and focusing on shape after colour.

They use popular myths, such as the paranormal alien manifestations in Roswell or the manufacturing secrets of the atomic bomb. For the latter, in the late 2000s, they made paintings of objects they brought back from the Los Alamos laboratories, which they then scanned. The phosphorescent paint they used creates the effect of a “memory of the light” (Still Life, Los Alamos series). They took photographs of uniform blue skies (1997-2002), which they presented as monochromes, thus raising pictorial questions while avoiding the materiality of painting.