Ecriture allongée
Anne-Marie Schneider

« Anne-Marie Schneider is essentially a draughtswoman, through and through. All of her works, no matter which medium or technique she chooses to use (including sculpture and painting, but also film between 1999 and 2007), are related to drawing, in the sense that they directly transpose a psychological activity onto a support, while simultaneously being the traces of a physical gesture which is, so to speak, the incorporation of this activity — whether this activity arises from observed events or these events are memories or imaginary projections, thus combining outer and inner worlds. They constitute images but also present themselves, absolutely and concretely, as traces of a subjectivity that the beholder is led to observe and, above all, merge with, if they are to share in the emotion that gave birth to these works. Each marking and each element in each work appears as a trace of their author’s subjectivity, which incidentally leads one to interpret it through the lens of what one thinks one knows about her life; and in doing so, to imbue it with an expressive value that too often makes one forget that this is indeed a creation whose final understanding is meaningless outside of the system and of art history. The hesitations in the linework, the successive layers of colour, the hiccups in the narration and the hybridisation of forms always lead back to a kind of fragility, a deferred suspension of the conclusion; in other words, an intrinsically provisional nature that distances itself as much as possible from the definitive and heroic forms associated with mediums unrelated to graphic arts ».

Thus begins Eric de Chassey’s text for the monographic publication* co-edited by the Museum of Sérignan and the gallery, which accompanies the exhibition..

« Writing from bottom to top and elongated writing, also the stroke of a bow drawing a looping circle, never stopping time ad infinitum» writes the artist to accompany her 7th solo exhibition at the gallery. Lengthening forms, lengthening time, bringing together forms and media: ceramics, works on paper, paintings.

Anne-Marie’s ceramics evoke the “fragile and unbreakable”, as the oft-repeated title of the artist’s exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003) puts it. The fragility of modeling combines with the violence of enameling in the ancestral Japanese technique of raku. At the center of the exhibition is a body of ceramic heads exhibited at the MAM (Mondes Parallèles, 2023) and the Musée de Sérignan (Le cercle est le monde, 2023). Works on paper, often “in black”, reveal the artist’s absolute urgency to get to the essential. Whether modeling clay, drawing on paper or painting on canvas, these simple forms express the great human sentiments of life, love and relationships with others...

Anne-Marie Schneider’s works have been exhibited in Documenta X (Kassel), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, la Monnaie de Paris, National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), BPS22 - Collections de la Province du Hainaut (Charleroi), The Morgan Library & Museum (New York), MRAC Occitanie (Sérignan), 35th Bienal de Sao Paulo, The Drawing Center (New York), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), Tracy Williams Ltd (New York), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Tapei), Fundació Juan Mirò (Barcelona), Museum Tongerlohuys (Rotterdam), LAM - Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut (Villeneuve-d’Ascq), Fondation Fernet-Branca (Saint-Louis), Maison Rouge (Paris), Museum Het Domein (Sittard), Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem), Oi Futuro (Rio de Janeiro).

In 2017, Anne-Marie Schneider had two major retrospectives at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) and the Museum of Contemporary Arts - Grand-Hornu (Boussu). In 2021 she received the Confirmation Prize in Painting from the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation and the Institut de France.

Her work is part of prestigious collections as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Contemporary Arts - Grand-Hornu (Boussu), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven), Guerlain Collection (Paris), Antoine de Galbert - Maison Rouge Foundation (Paris), The Morgan Library & Museum (New York), among others.