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Lili Dujourie


The artistic practice of Lili Dujourie emerged at first as a reaction on the depersonalised registers of 1960s abstract and minimal art. Insisting on an intimate, untouchable relation to body, matter, memory, culture and a room of one’s own it unfolded from here in a terra incognita between painting, sculpture, film, performance, and literature. The combination of two series from the early 1990s and 2000s in the exhibition intertwines the artist’s capacity of constantly re-inventing different appearan-ces for an unspeakable same.

Centred in the space, five freestanding Kabinetten (1992), a series of black iron boxes on lank and elegant legs filled with towel-like plaster drapes that are only partially visible, glance squarely in different directions and are surrounded by five objects, produced nine years later, that hover drawing alike on the walls, namely Eulalie, Achilles, Theodorus, Olivia, Eleonora (2000-2001), delicate hand bent and knotted iron wire, nakedly fixated portraits. Whispered memory into precarious and cheap matter for an eternal moment of standstill on the wall, hidden presences before its collapse on the floor. It seems like a tense celebration of pause as a necessary condition for any form of action. Together, these works do not speak of history or camouflage an absence. History has become a visual form within them, and they seem to be completely saturated through its subcutaneous weight. But perhaps it is just a struggle between fluid thought and static matter, between steel and plaster, metal and skin.

Martin Germann

Lili Dujourie


The artistic practice of Lili Dujourie emerged at first as a reaction on the depersonalised registers of 1960s abstract and minimal art. Insisting on an intimate, untouchable relation to body, matter, memory, culture and a room of one’s own it unfolded from here in a terra incognita between painting, sculpture, film, performance, and literature. The combination of two series from the early 1990s and 2000s in the exhibition intertwines the artist’s capacity of constantly re-inventing different appearan-ces for an unspeakable same.

Centred in the space, five freestanding Kabinetten (1992), a series of black iron boxes on lank and elegant legs filled with towel-like plaster drapes that are only partially visible, glance squarely in different directions and are surrounded by five objects, produced nine years later, that hover drawing alike on the walls, namely Eulalie, Achilles, Theodorus, Olivia, Eleonora (2000-2001), delicate hand bent and knotted iron wire, nakedly fixated portraits. Whispered memory into precarious and cheap matter for an eternal moment of standstill on the wall, hidden presences before its collapse on the floor. It seems like a tense celebration of pause as a necessary condition for any form of action. Together, these works do not speak of history or camouflage an absence. History has become a visual form within them, and they seem to be completely saturated through its subcutaneous weight. But perhaps it is just a struggle between fluid thought and static matter, between steel and plaster, metal and skin.

Martin Germann