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Béatrice Cussol

Les Parties
09.21.18 - 02.09.18
Personal Exhibition — La Médiathèque des Abattoirs – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

© PRINTEMPS DE SEPTEMBRE

PHOTO: DAMIEN ASPE

© Béatrice Cussol, N°456, 2008
Ballpoint ink and watercolour on paper, 100×160 cm, photo Claire Dorn, detail.

Associated curator : Annabelle Ténèze

Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse' library hosts an exhibition dedicated to Béatrice Cussol. The artist who is known for her drawing was invited to invest the space as well as to present an ensemble focusing on books that includes her novels and several of her collage note-books that the museum acquired last year.

 

Béatrice Cussol has developed a socially and politically committed drawing practice. She distorts the leisurely medium that is watercolour in favour of a feminist approach. She particularly borrows the lightness of watercolour's shapes in order to turn it into an expressive or even Expres- sionist and transgressive creation. The dewy softness of watercolour comes into contrast with the crudeness of the pictures, becoming elegant and explicit, vaporous and deep, light and politically committed, funny but worrying. Her artistic practice has developed around drawing but also reaches to fabrics and literature. She is also a novelist and has been writ- ing a picture-story for the past years in notebooks using cut-outs from magazines, bringing together her influences, angers, moving history, etc. The project presented at the Abattoirs bridges Béatrice Cussol's different facets for the first time by combining drawing, notebooks and novels in her architectural intervention.


Béatrice Cussol graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice in 1993. She is known for her figurative drawings that stage women in a dreamlike universe that thwarts female clichés (witches, eroticism etc.) She has also published five books: Merci (2000)

and Pompon (2001) with Balland editions and Diane? (2003) Sinon (2007) and
Les Souffleuses (2009) with Léo Scheer editions. Her work is part of public collections in France and Switzerland and her work has been shown in solo exhibi- tions (Villa Arson, Nice; Mamco, Geneve; Centre d’art de Neuchâtel, etc.) as well as in group shows (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Musée départemental d’art contem- porain de Rochechouart; Musée des Beaux-arts de Dôle; Musée d’art contempo- rain de Lyon; Centre d’art La Criée, Rennes, etc., as well as at the Pavillon Blanc in Colomiers for the 2016 edition of Le Printemps de septembre. She was a resident at the Villa Medicis from 2009 to 2010 and currently teaches at the École des Beaux-Arts in Rouen. She was born in 1970 in Toulouse and lives and works in Paris.

Exhibition realised in partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse.