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Simone Holliger | Mathieu Dafflon
UNE FORME DE GRAND PLAISIR, SEUL (A Form of Great Pleasure, Alone)
March 31 to June 20, 2020
Opening times: 24/24, from Mondays to Sundays
Simone Holliger and Mathieu Dafflon met during their studies at HEAD in Geneva. Today they live in Basel together with their daughter Tilda.
Simone Holliger’s artistic practice is based in the fields of sculpture and installation. She primarily uses paper as a flexible and sometimes unpredictable construction material, playfully reinterpreting a vocabulary of forms inspired by modern sculpture.
Mathieu Dafflon’s starting point for his artistic work is the overflowing and almost inexhaustible visual material of conventional and digital media, to which he gives a new identity through selection, decontextualization and painterly transformation. Since 2019, he has also been sending small-format paintings by mail as an alternative form of dialogue between artist, artwork, and viewer.
In Une Forme de grand plaisir, seul, the two artists are now attempting to realize a joint exhibition for the first time with their different forms of artistic expression. The invitation of the KMD has motivated them at the same time to address the art of Marcel Duchamp. The exhibition title Une Forme de grand plaisir, seul is a quotation from one of the six interviews that Georges Charbonnier conducted with Duchamp in December 1960 and January 1961 for French radio and which were published in 1994 by André Dimanche in Marseille.
In the realization of their exhibition, the question of how exactly to place their own working methods in resonance with Duchamp’s work was particularly important. The notions of “relationship“ and “body“ have played an important role and culminated in Holliger’s sculpture Foyer (paper, glue, acrylic ink, and epoxy resin), on the one hand, and Dafflon’s diptych Golden Hours (oil on cardboard covered with canvas) on the other.
Foyer is a playful exploration of Duchamp’s readymade Bottlerack. Holliger has inscribed her object with words on the inside, among other things, which at the same time remain “hidden in the intimacy of the interior space created“ for the viewer. With this procedure, Holliger is responding specifically to Duchamp’s mysterious sentence, which he wrote on the inside of the readymade in Paris in 1915, immediately before he moved to New York. It no longer exists today because his sister Suzanne disposed of the Bottlerack while cleaning up the studio and Duchamp later remembered neither the wording nor the content of the formulation (at least that is how the legend has it).
Mathieu Dafflon, for his part, takes as his starting point the object Prière de toucher, which Duchamp created for the cover of the catalog Le Surréalisme in 1947. He transfers Duchamp’s female breast, which we automatically touch when we consult the catalog, to the painting of two nipples, one male the other female, which we look at without touching them, thus making a voyeuristic wink at Étant donnés.
Simone Holliger, born in 1986 in Aarau, lives and works in Basel. Studied visual arts in Lucerne and then at the HEAD in Geneva, where she received her MA in 2014. Solo exhibitions (selection): Kunstraum Riehen (2020), Oxyd Kunsträume, Winterthur (2019), Body&Soul, Geneva (2018), Salle Crosnier, Geneva (2017). Group exhibitions (selection): Kunstmuseum Solothurn (2021, forthcoming), Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2020), Prix mobilière, Art Genève (2020), Swiss Art Awards, Basel (2019). Prizes and residencies (selection): Atelier Berlin, FCAC Geneva (2020), Swiss Art Award (2019), Förderpreis, Neue Aargauer Bank (2018).
Mathieu Dafflon, born in 1987 in Geneva, lives and works in Basel. Studied visual arts at the HEAD in Geneva and at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He currently lives and works in Basel where he co-founded the artist-run space Palazzina. His paintings have been exhibited in various art spaces in Switzerland including Galerie Wilde, Geneva (2019), Sonnenstube, Lugano (2018) and Last Tango, Zurich (2020).