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Agnès Thurnauer


Biography

Franco-Swiss artist born in 1962, lives in Paris and works in Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne).

A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 1985, she works in series - regularly enriched by new works - in dialogue with one another, weaving figure and abstraction, text and image, in a highly performative relationship with the space of the painting.


Language - the basis of relationships with others on both an intimate and societal scale - is the backbone of his work. In the “Big-big and Bang-bang” series of paintings, initiated in 1995, non-gendered anthropomorphic forms stand in duet before the viewer, inviting contemplative complicity. The work transposes the relationship to art, to oneself and to the other in a mirror game that brings non-verbal communication to the surface.

In the “Prédelles” series, begun in 2007, language, by contrast, takes center stage. Like open books, these diptychs revolve around a word cut into syllables and echoed plastically. The work is read and linked to the painted and drawn forms, in a background movement that brings meaning to the surface of the canvas.

In 2003, Agnès Thurnauer created her first “Portraits grandeur nature”, questioning the place of women artists in history and in institutions, and  to restore their presence, long overlooked. In a format reminiscent of both the tondi of the Italian Renaissance and the pins of pop culture, she feminizes and disrupts the gender of artists' names in the pantheon of art history, underlining the necessarily composite nature of identities. The “Portraits grandeur nature” welcomed viewers to the exhibition "Elles" @Centre Pompidou in 2009, and were recently exhibited at the National Museum of World Writing Systems in South Korea in 2024. 

This close interweaving of reflections on history and words continues in her pictorial work with the “Peintures d'histoires” series. Begun in 2005, this series invites a new reading of iconic paintings, weaving together the written word and the image. Words are first painted on the surface of the canvas, like a grid, then the figure takes shape between the letters. Sometimes, the text offers an intimate voice to previously impassive models.

“History is geography”, Agnès Thurnauer likes to say. This imaginary formula is embodied in the “Mapping the studio” series, where she depicts the studio floor as a map, with paintings as territories and all temporalities coexisting, without a single direction.

In the same way, Thurnauer documents the studio space and explores the boundaries of her thinking through writing. Her notes, which are also a diary of encounters and events that punctuate her work with words and images, materials and forms, were collected for the book L'Amour de la peinture, with a preface by Tiphaine Samoyault. 

Transposing the game of dialogue with past artists and their works into a literary game, in 2022 she imagines, in the same movement from brush to pen, a correspondence with Henri Matisse on the occasion of his monographic exhibition at the Musée Matisse in Nice. On this occasion, she wrote and published fifty letters addressed to her “Cher Henri”.

Developed in 2010, the “Matrices”, sculptures made from molds of letters, offer, in the form of seats, the pleasure of apprehending language with the body, through the body. Since 2021, they have been permanently installed at the Musée de l'Orangerie and are the subject of a major public commission by the French Ministry of Culture in the urban space of Ivry-sur-Seine.

Once again in a game of mirrors, “Tablettes”, the last series created in 2022, revives the dialogue with language and the written word. They are paintings and signs. These hearts of letters echo the “Matrices” of which they represent the hollow, the silence, the rhythm overflowing the vowels and composing a score like a dance traced by the brush.
 
Agnès Thurnauer has had numerous solo exhibitions in France and abroad, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2003), the SMAK in Ghent, Belgium (2007), the Musée LaM in Villeneuve d'Ascq (2022), the Musée Matisse in Nice (2022), the Musée d'Art Moderne in Fontevraud (2023) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (2025). Her work is included in numerous international private collections, as well as public collections in France, including the Centre Pompidou, Musée de l'Armée, Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration, Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, Musée des Beaux-arts d'Angers, Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, Fonds d'art contemporain - Paris Collections and FRACs (Bretagne, Auvergne, Île de France).


Selected works

Prédelle (now #15), Agnès Thurnauer
Prédelle (now #14), Agnès Thurnauer
Grande Prédelle (Maintenant), Agnès Thurnauer
Baby Big-Big #12, Agnès Thurnauer
Baby Big-Big #11, Agnès Thurnauer
Tablette, Agnès Thurnauer
Tablette #33, Agnès Thurnauer
Tablette #29, Agnès Thurnauer
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Museum exhibitions

CCCOD, Tours

CCCOD, Tours

CCCOD, Tours

CCCOD, Tours

SMAK, Ghent

SMAK, Ghent

SMAK, Ghent

SMAK, Ghent

SMAK, Ghent

SMAK, Ghent

CNDC, Angers

CNDC, Angers

Agnès Thurnauer -

FREE JAZZ, Henri Matisse and...(cur. Claudine Grammont), Drawing Lab, Paris, France, 2025


Videos

EXHIBITION

Agnes Thurnauer's exhibition "La traverser", Michel Rein, Paris, 2021

Matisse/Thurnauer #1

Agnès Thurnauer's exhibition « On se retrouve chez toi » at Musée Matisse, Nice, 2022, curated by Claudine Grammont

Matisse/Thurnauer #3

Agnès Thurnauer's exhibition « On se retrouve chez toi » at Musée Matisse, Nice, 2022, curated by Claudine Grammont

Matisse/Thurnauer #5

Agnès Thurnauer's exhibition « On se retrouve chez toi » at Musée Matisse, Nice, 2022, curated by Claudine Grammont

PERFORMANCE

Performance of Anna Chirescu and Alexandra Grimal, Michel Rein, Paris, 2023

CONVERSATION

Conversation with artist Agnès Turnauer, Cécile Debray and Clément dirié, Michel rein, Paris, 2023

INTERVIEW

Interview by Connaissance des arts on the theme "restitute or interpret ? »

Agnès Thurnauer - Aliénor l'Ouragane

Conversation between Agnès Thurnauer and Gatien Du Bois, co-curator of the exhibition Aliénor l'Ouragane at Fontevraud I Le Musée d'art Moderne, 2023.

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Press

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Publications

Immortelle. Un parcours dans la peinture française de 1945 à nos jours

Immortelle. Un parcours dans la peinture française de 1945 à nos jours

Publisher: Lord Byron

2023

Agnès Thurnauer

Agnès Thurnauer

Publisher: jrp editions

2023

Agnès Thurnauer, Aliénor l'Ouragane

Agnès Thurnauer, Aliénor l'Ouragane

Publisher: Musée d'Art moderne de Fontevraud et Bernard Chauveau Édition

2023

Cher Henri, correspondances avec Matisse

Cher Henri, correspondances avec Matisse

Publisher: Bernard Chauveau

2022

Préd elles

Préd elles

Publisher: Librairie Métamorphoses

2022

Josefffine n°11

Josefffine n°11

Publisher:

2019

A comme Boa

A comme Boa

Publisher: Thalie Art Foundation

2018

Préfigurer

Préfigurer

Publisher: Galerie Fernand Léger

2016

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Portfolio