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Anne Deguelle

Les mariées de Fécamp
09.21.18 - 10.21.18
Installation — Musée Calbet (Grisolles)

© PRINTEMPS DE SEPTEMBRE

PHOTO: DAMIEN ASPE

© Anne Deguelle, Les Mariées de Fécamp, 2002, partial view.
The artwork is part of the collection of Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse.

Associated curator : Marie Delanoë

Born in 1943 in Paris, she lives and works between Paris and Aveyron’s region.

 

Alexander the Great rebuilt a Palais Bénédictine in Fécamp, as much a factory as a museum, in order to distil his liquor “La Béné” and to give his little orphan-girls packaging work there. This diverse palace welcomed Anne Deguelle for a residency in 2002. During the residency, the artist high-lighted the subtle link between this place steeped in history that could only give rise to extraordinary productions and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even – also called The Large Glass – by Marcel Duchamp.

 

Les Mariées de Fécamp (the brides of Fécamps) was born from the inappropriateness of a bottle of Bénédictine in the The Green Box, preliminary to The Large Glass. These notes were a starting point for Anne Deguelle's work in her research that resembles a documentary investigation stemming from the intuition that this palace could not have been unknown to Marcel Duchamp because of his architectural creativeness in this area that he frequently visited as a child. Anne Deguelle proceeds to reread the Large Glass's composition. It is organised in two superimposed floors that resemble the way the palace is divided: at the top the bride and groom and underneath the celibate machine of which Marcel Duchamp left a sketch in his Green Box that is the pivotal point of this demonstration. Anne Deguelle's research – docu- ments compiled and arranged like different archival collections that show the link between The Large Glass and the abbey – give all of their signify- ing force to the hundreds of bottles of “Béné”, miniature Brides of Fécamp in their white tissue paper, petrified and timeless that together make up Les Mariées de Fécamp.
 

Anne Deguelle's work is strewed with references to emblematic figures of the 20th century – Raymond Roussel, Sigmund Freud, Duchamp, Beuys, Manzoni, Zadkine – as well as Shakespeare, etc. Starting from forgotten or neglected details she extracts new signs from them in order to elaborate a fiction that could be a reality despite the existing literature. Trained at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris her work is exhibited

in France and Europe – Centre Pompidou (2014), Le Fresnoy (2015), 6e Thessaloniki Biennale (2017).

Exhibition realised in co-production with the Musée Calbet (Grisolles).

The artwork Les Mariées de Fécamp is part of the collection of the Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse.