Artist: Nathalie Du Pasquier

Kerlin Gallery presents Saint Fairy Anne, a new exhibition by the internationally renowned French artist Nathalie Du Pasquier.

For Saint Fairy Anne, Nathalie Du Pasquier presents recent paintings within a custom exhibition design of colourful painted zones. Blending still life with architectural forms, the artist's works on canvas present bold shapes and linear motifs, creating dynamic compositional arrangements that echo across the installation that houses them. Taking a fluid and porous approach to traditional distinctions between ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ arts, Du Pasquier is interested in “how display changes perception, how coloured walls influence the paintings, [and] how the viewer enters a mood”.

Complimenting these recent works, Saint Fairy Anne includes a 1998 still life, natural things and a plyer. Here, objects appear oversized and floating in space, bestowing an almost talismanic charge to the flotsam of an artist’s studio. Chosen intuitively for this presentation, the work demonstrates the broad shifts that have taken place in Du Pasquier’s practice over the past two decades. We move from “paintings of things”, in which three-dimensional objects are arranged in two-dimensional space, towards “paintings as objects”, where form and perspective are broken down and reconfigured, generating a more fluid relationship between colour, form and spatial dynamics. Even when returning to still life paintings, as in two 2024 paintings exhibited here, the focus is on outline, with radically simplified forms echoing the artist’s shift towards abstraction.

The exhibition’s title, Saint Fairy Anne, offers a play on words: a phonetic Anglicisation of “ça ne fait rien”, or “it doesn’t matter”. Along with the artist’s irreverent ink drawing on which these words appear, it offers an injection of humour, playfulness and experimentation. Though often using graphic forms, Du Pasquier’s paintings maintain a distinctly analogue feel – the artist’s hand leaving a painterly finish and off-kilter verve.

About Nathalie Du Pasquier
Born in Bordeaux, Nathalie Du Pasquier first discovered pattern and texture in West Africa in the 1970s and has lived in Milan since 1979. A founding member of the Memphis design group, she designed textiles, carpets, plastic laminates, furniture and objects before dedicating herself to painting in 1987. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthaus Biel, Switzerland; MACRO, Rome; MRAC, Sérignan; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Camden Arts Centre, London; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; Hôtel des Arts, Toulon and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in France. Forthcoming exhibitions include Museo Costantino Nivola, Orani, Sardinia, Italy (from 17 May). Public collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.