Agnès THURNAUER - Biography and artist's artworks

Agnès Thurnauer
Born in 1982 in Paris
Lives and works in Paris and Ivry-sur-Seine
Agnès Thurnauer studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, graduating in 1985

Agnès Thurnauer is a painter and sculptor who also draws, engraves, and writes, keeping a studio journal that was first published in 2014. In her work, she explores the question of language, its representation, and its interpretation, engaging in a dialogue with the history of art, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. She questions the absence or presence of women in art history. In 2009, her work opened the elles@centre pompidou exhibition. Her life-size Portraits, tondos on which she paints the names of male artists in a feminized form, from Marcelle Duchamp to Annie Warhol, from Jacqueline Pollock to Francine Picabia... made her famous. Alongside her paintings, which she produces in series, she creates installations of large letters in resin or brushed aluminum, the Matrices, which are displayed in venues such as the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Her works are featured in major collections and she has had solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, the Nantes Museum, the Matisse Museum in Nice, and the Chaux-de-Fonds Museum. 

Agnès Thurnauer said: “Words speak to us in a different way than shapes. I use them for this reason, as another dimension, a new palette, additional colors—words expand the vocabulary I have at my disposal to invent new representations. Words in the context of a painting have an off-screen presence just as much as shapes or colors.”