Timothy Taylor Gallery

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Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by the Swiss born artist Mai-Thu Perret. As a means of investigating modernism’s revolutionary potential, Perret has created a complex oeuvre that combines radical feminist politics with literary utopian texts and homemade crafts.

The exhibition, Parade, will feature a series of new small gouache on panel paintings and a large fabric banner piece. Perret considers her reductive abstract paintings as signifiers that lack a referent – the elemental language employed in these compositions recall bygone systems that nevertheless seem to posit a residual meaning. Reminiscent of icons or Tantric paintings used for developing abstract visualization during meditation, these diminutive paintings suggest their own portability and a function outside the realms of art.

The multi-disciplinary output of Russian Constructivists such as Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko has proved particularly inspirational for Perret’s increasingly experimental practice, which has come to encompass performance and dance. The scale of Perret’s wall-based banner in this exhibition alludes to a stage curtain and anticipates some form of group participation. Suggesting either the setting for a dramatic production or the starting point of a religious procession, this environment sets in play a dynamic between the personal and collective and the individual versus the abstract.

In The Crystal Frontier, a collection of texts the artist began writing in 1999, Perret explores personal transformation through collective living via the imaginary model of an all female, radically-minded community which is in retreat from capitalist society somewhere in the New Mexico desert. This meta-narrative has spawned sculptures, paintings, handcrafted ceramics, performances, films, posters, mannequins, furniture and banners – often proposed as the diverse output of the members of this fictional commune.

Mai-Thu Perret was born in Geneva in 1976 and educated at Cambridge University. In addition to several current group exhibitions Perretʼs recent solo exhibitions have included: Aspen Art Museum, 2009; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008; An Evening of the Book and Other Stories at The Kitchen in New York, 2008; The Crystal Frontier at Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 2008; and Maastrichtʼs Bonnefanten Museum, 2007. In December 2010 Perret’s solo exhibition, An Ideal for Living, opens at University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor. In 2011, Perret will have solo exhibitions at MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland; and Le Magasin, Grenoble, France. In 2010 Perret won the I.D.H.E.A.P prize for her short film In Darkness Let Me Dwell (2010) and the Prix Manor 2011. Perret is currently making the dance work Lettres d’amour en brique ancienne, which will be premiered in Geneva on March 17, 2011.

• Download the press release (PDF)
• Read more about Mai-Thu Perret