Mira Schor — Margin of Safety — Marcelle Alix Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 14 → May 18, 2024

The second exhibition of an artist at the gallery brings with it a different joy than the first, which is entirely attached to the excitement of discovery. Today, it is more about reactivating the experience of visual pleasure and testing once again the thoughts and feelings that came along when in contact with the works. Living with them every day during the duration of a show allows us to confirm or refute certain intuitions in two simultaneous movements: we delve deeper into the artist’s processes, and at the same time, this intimate knowledge enables us to develop our own relationship with the work, to understand “what it does to us.”

Mira Schor, Donnie’s Got a Gun, 2018 — Ink and oil on gessoed linen 12 x 16 inches unique Galerie Marcelle Alix, Paris

Mira Schor’s practice is exemplary in this regard. First because it has been accompanied for forty years by the artist’s writings, a true guide toward a deep understanding of the work. And second, because it is entirely devoted to visual pleasure from a female perspective. Thus, it addresses both senses and mind, and “what it does to us” could not be more complete. If, by chance, we were not sensitive to the paintings on free canvas in the first exhibition at Marcelle Alix, the works on paper of the second show and its army of “Power Figures” installed in the same basement, will appeal to our need to find strong female figures of emancipation in contemporary representations. Those self-portraits as ’stick figures’ find their counterpoints in the “Black paintings” of the last room: inspired by the diverse scandals of Donald Trump’s presidency, they ridicule the attempts of the former US President to transform vain male attributes into signs of power.

Marcelle Alix