Claire Morgan — Perpetually at the Centre — Karsten Greve Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 14 → December 23, 2017

A visual artist of Irish origin, Claire Morgan is one of the most sought after and talented artists on the international scene today. This exhibition unveils the artist’s most recent works, created especially for this space, to the public. Fuelled by environmental and ethical concerns, this exhibition includes four new suspended installations predominated by the dynamics between the bodies of taxidermy animals that seem to be contained within synthetic or alien environments, and new compositions displayed in vitrines, including one that incorporates text. A corpus of delicate sketches permits us to discover the artist’s meticulous creative work juxtaposed with the ardent and instinctive impetus of a surprising series of large-scale canvases.

Claire Morgan’s work explores the ambivalence in the human being’s relationship with the natural world that surrounds him/her. The artist’s reflections on the human presence in the world, which has resulted in the progressive destruction of our natural environment, are externalised in her installations using taxidermy animals that appear to be inhabiting and adapting to a world of superficial post-consumer waste that engulfs them. In the suspended temporality that defines these aerial sculptures, in which bodies are immobilised in a state of perpetual motion, this conflict plays out between life and death; between the organic and the artificial.

It was contemplations about the power of nature, as well as an exploration of the self, ego and mortality, that bore this exhibition. The vastness of the sea, wild forests and the night all manifest as an abyss or the fear of the unknown, a subject meditated upon until it has become rather a metaphor for life itself, and reveals the vulnerability of humankind. This thought process does indeed take into account the on-going tragic events that we see on a near-daily basis. From the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean where, for thousands of migrants, the sea can move from vector of hope to tomb; to the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower where people saw their homes transformed into a hellish vision; to the increasing occurrence of extreme weather that surely predicts environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.

In this artist’s work, nature stupefies: perfect in its immobility. The ambiguous vital presence of these taxidermy animals contrasts the fragile geometry that this “assembling virtuosa” creates with the help of nylon thread from which she hangs dandelion seeds or fragments of plastic. Claire Morgan’s world is a universe where nature, assaulted by the invasive and cynical presence of the modern human being, uses its ultimate beauty to resist. Incarnated in the perfection of geometric and minimalist scenarios, it is also in the fragility of structures so light that a mere gust of wind could make them disappear.