Elizabeth Garouste, "Chimeras"

From 19 November 2015 to 13 January 2016

Elizabeth Garouste presents her “Chimeras” at Polad-Hardouin gallery

19 November 2015 / 13 January 2016

Vernissage on Thursday 19 November at 6 pm

An internationally acclaimed designer for 30 years, Elizabeth Garouste unveils her secret gardens at Polad-Hardouin gallery. After a first exhibition of drawings in 2011, Garouste’s chimeras unfold in three dimensions and in the whole range of her trademark eclectic materials. For the first time, her mysterious ideas and automatic daydreams take a boldly outlined shape, filled with personality and audacity.
Starting from drawing… At the root of her work is drawing. Automatic drawing, executed anywhere and anytime. Bold and phantasmal, it fills the void and exorcises nightmares with passion and humour. Thus, Garouste’s sculpted, painted and assembled work reveals first and foremost her freedom as an artist and as a woman. As discrete as she is bold, Garouste creates a universe that makes one smile and shudder, a universe that talks of libido and demons, life and death, transformation, the couple, and femininity.
Pure black and white, wrought iron, mirrors, painted earth, rough tapestries and coloured fabrics create an ensemble whose functionality is never entirely absent, but distorted in such as a way as to remain open to interpretation.
Her chimeras, characters, animals and plants, multi-faced masks and mirrored figures, describe a world that is both creative and ever-changing, a world where everything is relative and where one can recognize oneself only through the juxtaposition of perspectives. Her “potatoes” look like votive offerings for travelling from one world to the next, hanging from a leafless tree of life. Her reclining figures, with a touch of Arte Povera, are timeless in spite of their decisively contemporary, almost manga-like traits as they interact with scenes that seem to come from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Her couple of candleholders explicitly evoke feminine and masculine sexuality, but on closer examination the flower looks quite poisonous…

About Elizabeth Garouste. After starting off as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and objects, since the 1980s Elizabeth Garouste has been working between unique pieces and iconic industrial design. In 2011, the artist started gradually uncovering a more intimate side of her work at Polad-Hardouin gallery, in Paris. There her drawings and sculptures reveal other territories, secret and adventurous.
Theatre sets, private interiors and furniture, tramways, the office of the Prime Minister, an iconic carafe and flask: her design work has been presented at major galleries and museums in France and abroad. Her line of furniture, characterised by unexpected materials (bronze, wrought iron, wood, ceramic, glass and resin) and by traits that are at once baroque and barbaric, was produced by the design galleries En attendant les Barbares, Mouvement Moderne and Granville. Showcased at Ralph Pucci gallery in New York, Garouste joined Polad-Hardouin gallery in 2011.