Lili Dujourie has been working for more than three decades by now. It is about time a more global and exhaustive approach to her artistic creations and her evolution over the years was offered. With more than 40 works -sculpture, photographs, projections, and drawings- displayed in 9 rooms of the museum, this retrospective exhibition charts the wide-ranging oeuvre that Lili Dujourie has created, by presenting works from each of the major series she has undertaken, plus little-known early works.
A reappraisal of the familiar genres of art
Dujourie’s singular trajectory has been fuelled as much by a close study of literature, poetry, and film as by a deep knowledge of the art of the past. These varied sources inform her practice without determining either its form or its style. In this way they prompt reappraisal of the familiar categories and genres of art, redefining normative conventions which govern subject and sitter, model and maker, viewer and viewed.Thus she may conjure up the erotic seductions of baroque portraiture, the tender allure of a nude intimately scrutinised, and the fragile contours of an historical luminary. Recursive rather than linear, these subtle probings are made manifest in discrete bodies of work which comprise the nucleus of this extensive exhibition.
Key works
While her art is highly diverse in the range of media and materials it employs, certain abiding preoccupations underpin her work. Her pensive works evoke a domain of thought and feeling that verges on the inexpressible and ineffable and that partakes of both the visible and the invisible, the available and the secreted, the overt and the covert the moment of its maturity, c.1972, as seen in American Imperialis and the first of the Homage a… videos. While sculpture has been the territory she has been most clearly identified with in recent years, during the seventies she made an extraordinary group of some seventeen videos that have been widely praised since their recent restoration and exhibition. With hindsight, they have been acclaimed as key works of the decade exploring issues relating to the body, the female subject, feminine and feminist aesthetics, and the nature of temporality in the creative act.
IIlustration: Lili Dujourie Joséphine, 2001 Iron wire, 55 x 70 x 11,5 cm
© Photo : Kristien Daem
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