Martin Dammann — Dieses Feuer — In Situ hors les murs Atelier Rouart — In Situ Gallery, Fabienne Leclerc — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 29 → May 31, 2014

In Situ Fabienne Leclerc is giving pride of place to Martin Dammann in the framework of its double programming with two successive exhibitions, “Dieser Feuer” and “Zeichnung”. The gallery, now located in the Marais, also occasionally invests temporary venues. This second event once again will be held in the Rouart studio, a home as well as a place for artistic exchanges built in the 1930s by Berthe Morisot’s heirs.

Dieses Feuer (“this fire”) in the Rouart studio is bathed in the studio’s history and the mark left by Berthe Morisot. In the first space, the venue’s historical imprint has inspired a scenography based on the concepts of history/time, gender and late 19th-century painting. The works’ themes are the relationships between men and women but the artist’s technique and the contemporaneity that enlivens his use of color goes beyond the classical subject.

Martin Dammann takes advantage of the studio’s main space to exhibit a large number of sketches that have accompanied his pictorial production over the last 10 years. Like a reference to the venue’s principal function, a place of experience and artistic reflection, the installation communicates a fertile dialogue between the drawing’s structure and the dissolving that the color contributes.

Lastly, an intermediate room at the center of the exhibition’s scenography welcomes an installation of night photos and thus forms a dark narrative frame that resonates with the whole of his work.

Martin Dammann’s attention is focused on the many aspects of the relationship — frequently contradictory — that the images have with what they represent and consequently with what they are not. This is, for example, the case for the anonymous war photo, an important starting point in Dammann’s work. Questions on history, identity, representation and perception confront each other in the artist’s oeuvre.