PRESS KIT JUUL KRAIJER Exhibition from March 13 to April 6 2019 Opening on Tuesday 12 March from 6pm to 9pm Exhibition Conversation Performance 17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 www.fillesducalvaire.com [email protected] Press request : [email protected] JUUL KRAIJER Exhibition from March 13 to April 6 2019 Opening on Tuesday March 12 from 6pm to 9pm The galerie Les Filles du Calvaire has the pleasure of announcing the solo exhibition of the Dutch artist Juul Kraijer (nominated for the Prix Guerlain du Dessin Contemporain 2018) bringing together photographs, drawings, sculptures and video. « Man has been called by the ancients a lesser world and indeed the term is well applied; because, as man is composed of earth, water, fire, and air, this body of earth is similar. While man has within himself bones as a stay and framework for the flesh, the world has stones which are the supports of earth. While man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean, which also rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world; as from the said pool of blood proceed the veins which spread their branches through the human body so the ocean fills the body of the earth with an infinite number of veins of water » (Léonard de Vinci) Juul Kraijer, Untitled, 2014-2015 Juul Kraijer. Morphogenesis, the life of forms 19.58 x 14.29 inches. Pigment printing on paper Hahnemühle Museum Etching In a series of photographs by Juul Kraijer, a snake surrounds a face like a Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire shawl or headdress from a Holbein painting. The scales, which resemble an organic fabric, become an integral part of the body. In a drawing, a head of hair shelters a bush. In another scene, mosquitos swarm a body, which nevertheless remains still. For the artist, it is a question of a state of consciousness. The serene beauty of her models recalls the harmony of Greek statues. The fineness of her line and the precision of the details evoke drawings from the Renaissance. In counterpoint, the butterflies nesting on a woman’s skin bring to mind a waking dream, which becomes an organic nightmare. In another drawing, a branch coming out of a mouth speaks of co-existence or, rather, of the dialogue with all living things. In this space of hybridisation, the boundaries between the human, animal, insect and plant are abolished. Her photographs on a black background, the exact layout of a flower, recall Art Forms in Nature by the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt. Juul Kraijer insists « these are not portraits, but abstract, almost transcendent faces. » The concentration and light are those of meditation : time paused. 17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 / www.fillesducalvaire.com / [email protected] Kraijer is fascinated by the flexibility of dancers’ bodies and their state of mind. The body as a malleable material is the place of an excess where every kind of metamorphosis is enacted. Here, the gravity of the human condition disappears. In the video Prologue, the curled-up dancer is enveloped in a fabric like a chrysalis. Her arms come out in slow motion, unfolding in space. This performance evokes different phases of growth. All of Kraijer’s Juul Kraijer, Untitled, 2015-2016 œuvre evokes this morphogenesis: the development of an organism, the 39.49 x 55.32 inches. Charcoal on paper folding and unfolding of a form. Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire Most of her protagonists are looking inward; this introspection is shared with the spectators. For Lise Pauton, a contortionist and choreographer, also one of Kraijer’s models, this attitude is central to dance in order to arrive at a meta-consciousness: forgetting the self. The upside-down dancer forms a wheel like a snake biting its tail, “the ouroboros” Juul Kraijer tells us. This circle embodies both present time and suspended time. This timelessness characterises Kraijer’s work. Her long sojourns in India, with her husband, an Indian artist, have opened up a world to her of intense contrasts and dazzling nature with its inherent dangers: the artist emphasises that she is hypnotized by the snake’s beauty and threat; this juxtaposition marks all her work. She nevertheless rejects a symbolic interpretation of this, instead, she is right up close to reality: her gaze captures the analogy of forms: veins, trees’ branches and the folds of entrails. In her photographs of dancers, the back with its clearly visible spinal column reveals the objectivity of her gaze. The body’s muscular tissue and the backbone are sculpted by light. This relief looks like a fossil. Like a botanist, she studies the architecture of the living world around her.. Juul Kraijer offers us a new approach to the human being as an anchorage of living structures. She shows the dynamic principle of nature, inherent in each being. Her œuvre unites the internalisation of the gaze to the exteriorisation of the skin. The gaze opens to the interior. Human skin, this boundary, mutates by becoming the earth that shelters micro-organisms of other living forms, animal or plant. An almost surrealist drawing of a woman’s face covered with butterflies, whose wings have eyes, shows the permutation that Kraijer brings about towards this other gaze, that of nature. Juul Kraijer raises one of the major issues of civilisation in crisis: to rethink the human body interacting with the species and our natural milieu. Man’s flesh fits within a vital universal flux. Jeanette Zwingenberger Member of the AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and an independent curator. She teaches art history at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. DURING THE SHOW SATURDAY APRIL 6 2019 at the gallery CONVERSATION / MEETING AT 4PM PERFORMANCE « INTROSPECTION » AT 5.30PM Animated by Jeanette Zwingenberger By Lise Pauton (RaieManta Compagnie) (art historian and independent curator). With : Lise invites spectators to a state of introspection by Paz Corona and Corinne Mercadier (Artists of the navigating through her contortions. This time is nourished gallery presented at Art Paris, Art Fair) and Juul by the visuals of the photographs of Juul Kraijer, with Kraijer (exhibited at the gallery) whom she works as a model. She positions herself between photography and the spectator as a vector allowing to enter, a little more, the singular alchemy of a work of art. About : Lise Pauton has been a contortionist since she was a child. She became a choreographer when she founded the RaieManta Compagnie in 2010. She takes a contemporary look at the art of ancestral contortion and works with a demanding, sensitive and unique means of expression. Subject to the number of available seats. Photo : ©KSH FROM 4 TO 7 APRIL 2019 ART PARIS ART FAIR (Grand Palais, Paris) The galerie Les Filles du Calvaire has the pleasure of announcing its participation at Art Paris, Art Fair 2019. We will present on our booth the latest works of Corinne Mercadier, Paz Corona and Zhuo Qi. Corinne Mercadier, Un jeu, Espace Second series, 2018 17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire 75003 Paris 01 42 74 47 05 / www.fillesducalvaire.com / [email protected] JUUL KRAIJER Born 1970 in Assen, The Netherlands Lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands Juul Kraijer studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and lives and works in Rotterdam. Her main mediums are drawing and photography, sculpture and video works. Her works are found in many international collections: MoMA, New York; KIASMA, Helsinki; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), Tasmania; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam; Teylers Museum, Haarlem; Drents Museum, Assen; Stedelijk Museum; Museum Het Domein, Sittard; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; Museum Overholland and many private and corporate collections in Europe, the United States and India. SOLO SHOWS (selection) 1998 Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands Stedelijk Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands. 2001 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 2004 Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milan, Italy Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, The Netherlands 2005 Kunstverein Arnsberg, Arnsberg, Germany 2006 Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands 2007 Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milan, Italy 2008 Kewenig Galerie, Cologne, Germany. 2009 Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, The Netherlands 2010 Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India. 2014 Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz, Switzerland The Wapping Project/Bankside, London, UK Kunsthalle Giessen, Giessen, Germany 2015 Drents Museum & CBK Drenthe, Assen, The Netherlands 2016 Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India. Juul Kraijer. Drawings and Photographs 2017 Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Chimaera. GROUP SHOWS (sélection) 2001 Kabinet Overholland, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Dutch Glory Museum of Modern Art, New York City, U.S.A.. Recent acquisitions in the department of drawings 2004 Museo ICO, Madrid, Spain Comportamientos actuales del dibujo -Arte Termita contra Elephante Blanco Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Pfäffikon, Zwitserland. Animaux. Von Menschen und Tieren Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rovereto, Italy. Il Bello e le Bestie. Del divenire animale 2005 Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf. Slow Art. Zeitgenössige Kunst aus den Niederlanden und Flandern Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland Apeldoorns Museum CODA, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands Institut Neérlandais, Paris, France Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany. Into Drawing. Contemporary Dutch Drawings 2006 Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland. ARS 06 - SENSE OF THE REAL. 2007 Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany. Symbolismus und die Kunst der Gegenwart. CentrePasquArt Biel, Switzerland Surréalités.