Odonchimeg Davaadorj — Phusis — Backslash Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 13 → April 17, 2021

Odonchimeg Davaadorj — Galerie Backslash Les dessins, peintures et installations de la jeune artiste Odonchimeg Davaadorj présentées à la galerie Backslash à l’occasion de ... 2 - Bien Critique

By appointment only

Odonchimeg Davaadorj’s work draws on different artistic practices and techniques which centre on the artist’s overwhelming interest in her immediate environment. Or rather, environments in the plural, ranging as they do from those associated with her early years in her native rural Mongolia to those of her current life in a western city. They all furnish her with a springboard for the explorations and investigations that feed into her work.

Her second exhibition at Backslash features a large-scale installation, highly characteristic of her art, which uses sewing thread to link figures to their environment as well as to each other. It serves as a preface, heralding the notions of community and sharing that are such a powerful presence in the new show.

Next come the paintings, revealing a new artistic approach. A series of portraits paint a diverse, cosmopolitan picture of humanity. The figures depicted are inherently linked to nature, to living beings. Davaadorj represents the organic and plant worlds at one with humans. She describes her work as fully aware of the issues that mark our era. Youth, ecological concerns and feminism lie at the heart of her pieces.

She states that the living world is “at the centre of all (her) creations.” She has therefore devised a space for Backslash that fosters exchanges and movement. The exhibition will not be static but will evolve in several ways over the course of its run. Davaadorj is thus rejecting the rigid notion of a fixed spacetime. The evolving design of the installations, particularly drawing journals whose pages will turn as the days pass, supports the notion of movement.

Davaadorj’s approach here highlights the relationship to the other, the commitment and exchange between artist and public. She creates benevolent modes of interaction, with visitors offered courtesies and treatments. On Saturdays, the exhibition will feature poetry readings, hand massages, private discussions and conversations over tea.
Davaadorj’s desire to connect to the public with this series of modest interactions underscores the community aspect of her art. These “conversations”, in the spirit of the one that opens the exhibition, highlight the collective harmony our societies need.

The artist, someone of profound sensibility, explains: “I want to create a bond that lasts longer than the day of the private view. What’s the point of showing petrified, hallowed works and of turning an exhibition space into a shrine?”¹

Born in 1990, Odonchimeg Davaadorj graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Her work has been exhibited at Galerie Premier Regard and the Salon de Montrouge in 2018, the various Salo events, CAC Meymac and Transpalette, Gallery 976 in Ulan-Bator, the Fondation Hermès La Verrière in Brussels and in San Francisco and Beirut.
In 2013, she realized a performance at the Palais de Tokyo. She has won a number of awards, including the Salon de Montrouge ADAGP prize, and has been nominated for the Drawing Now 2021 award. In 2020, exhibitions of her work were scheduled at the Parkview Museums in Singapore then Beijing, both cancelled due to the pandemic. She recently designed a window installation for CAC La Traverse in Alfortville.

¹ Interview in Point contemporain #20 (March-April-May 2021).