WORKS


Parfum d'epines

Phillips Paris and VO Curations

Muriel Abadie, Jean-Marie Appriou, Robert Brambora, Claude Bellegarde, Sonya Derviz, Daiga Grantina, Oda Jaune, Victor Man and Pedro Wirz

23rd May – 21st July, 2019









Phillips Paris and London-based curatorial platform VO Curations present Perfume of Thorns, an exhibition taking place in the Paris galleries of 46 rue du bac, from 23 May to 21 June 2019. Perfume of Thorns is a unique reading of the 19th Century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal through the spectrum of nine acclaimed and emerging contemporary artists. Launching alongside the Parcours Saint Germain’s 2019 fair which is themed La Fleur de l’Art, VO Curations will be organising a unique show that will emphasize the ongoing impact of Baudelaire’s work.

Perfume of Thorns plays upon Baudelaire’s fascination with duality and the cohesion of polar opposites. The atmosphere in 1850s Paris which Baudelaire was immersed in, one of elegance and sophistication, but also of misery and despair. The city was in the midst of Hausmannian change, and from this emerged the volume Les Fleurs du Mal, culled from the morbid and the sublime, the sacred and the profane, by perfumes and thorns, fundamental axioms of his literary universe.

Included in the Perfume of Thorns exhibition is the work of Victor Man, whose childlike figures eerily remind Baudelaire’s Muse Malade, the idealised figure turned nightmarish and unresponsive. French artist on the rise Jean-Marie Appriou, whose work has previously exhibited in solo shows at Palais de Tokyo and Fondation Louis Vuitton, is represented with his mystical aluminium bats and serpents that seem to defy their tenebrous and Biblical symbolism and emulate the grace of the contorting dancer from Le Serpent qui danse. Other artists include Centre Pompidou exhibitee Claude Bellegarde, Latvia’s representative for the 2019 Venice Biennale Daiga Grantina, and former Venice Biennale participant Oda Jaune, represented by Daniel Templon Gallery, as well as Robert Brambora, Pedro Wirz, Muriel Abadie, and Sonya Derviz.








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SONYA DERVIZ