Prendre le temps - Christiane Fath et François Bauer

Painter Christiane Fath is based in La Réunion. Her colors burst out over canvases steeped in history, which are often fabrics from her own family linen chest. She draws, prints, and lays out designs as she sees fit, using a wide range of techniques as well as inventing her own painting processes. Respecting the original dimensions of each piece, she reclaims these imposing surfaces by saturating them with autobiographical motifs. African landscapes, the Mediterranean coastline, mashrabiya latticework, and the outlines of Paris’ 11th and 12th arrondissements can all be found scattered throughout her work.

François Bauer is a ceramicist based in Strasbourg. He describes himself as a potter because of the many utilitarian objects he creates, but he is also a painter and even an architect when he sets about constructing and deconstructing forms, organizing planes, and juxtaposing colors. In a back-and-forth game between surface and volume, and by daring to use unexpected combinations, he pushes the clay towards unlikely balances and bold configurations. His objects both maintain and deviate from function, serving as supports for paintings inspired by his childhood memories and family history, from which he inherited his unconditional love of Fauvist painting, vivid colors, and flowers.

Christiane Fath and François Bauer come together as a unique artistic duo for this exhibition. Their collaboration will spread throughout the Kunsthalle, engaging with its different spaces as well as its architectural quirks to offer visitors an immersive installation where they can prendre le temps – take their time. Drawing on their respective practices in painting and ceramics and a shared love of flamboyant color, they present a group of works, many created specifically for this exhibition, whose staging provides the perfect backdrop for reverie. Paintings, objects, sets, and furnishings all work together, each piece conversing and harmonizing with the others in the shared goal of creating a space for enjoyment and well-being, where art manifests simultaneously in color, shape, media, and play, and in which visitors can lounge, loiter, and enjoy themselves. The exhibition is an invitation to travel and the promise of a break; it holds back the tide of time and generously shares all the joy that art can offer.

Curator : Sandrine Wymann.