Anne-Marie Schneider — Peter Freeman, Inc. Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 16, 2013 → January 25, 2014

While in the past Schneider’s work has included film, and even sculpture, this exhibition is focused on drawing, most with a new intensity of color that supports an often psychologically charged imagery.

The newest work, all 2012 and 2013, feels both spontaneous and searching, especially in two new large suites, one depicting girls at play, and the other just faces, often contorted and awash in color. The expressionism of these new series contrasts with her previous, more geometrically reduced and almost formal figurative work that was featured in the 2010 Prix Marcel Duchamp presentation. Also included is a group of oil paintings (rare in Schneider’s work) and drawings inspired by Beauty and the Beast, all from 2009-10, works that had first been presented over the last year in Lille as an artist’s intervention hung amongst the permanent collections of LAM (Musée d’Art moderne, d’Art contemporain et d’Art brut de Villeneuve-d’Ascq). On the first floor of the gallery are installed 14 large-scale drawings from 2009, though exhibited now for the first time.

Schneider approaches drawing in the same way as one might keep a personal diary, some works revealing her most intimate thoughts, and others reacting to the news headlines or just every-day-life events. Often based on poetic associations of ideas, her work notably broaches themes of duality and exclusion, of the woman’s role in society, the world of childhood, and fairy tales; a delicate and personal universe which perpetually oscillates between dream and reality, humour and tragedy, pleasure and pain. Her point of view is at once tough and tender: she captures the essential and transmits emotions with a huge economy of means.

In this new exhibition at the gallery, intense color is perhaps the unifying feature of all the drawings, regardless of subject, Scheider’s work of recent years largely forsaking her previous preference for India ink and charcoal for the infinite chromatic range of gouache, watercolour and acrylic.