Claire Adelfang Impossible Façon
Musée Des Beaux-arts D'orléans
Place Sainte Croix, Orléans, France
Opening: Thursday 17 November, 7pm
For the title of her first monographic museum exhibition, Claire Adelfang chose a fragment from a poem by Gherasim Luca: Impossible Façon, to emphasize the implacable and genuine character of her photographic approach. Claire Adelfang brings to light abandoned places that are silent witnesses of a bygone era. The artist constructs her images to materialize what she likes to call the “Strata of History”. The word strata is a perfect match, as it evokes the accumulation of sediments —stratification — that the archeologist unearths and analyses one after another with the aim to understand a place and its history, the passage of time and the captured traces of the vanished. Beauty is secondary and almost accidental.
On the occasion of her exhibition and as a tribute to the city of Orléans, Claire Adelfang reached out to the heritage of Orléans and developed a new series dedicated to an emblematic place that will be brought back to life soon, Les Vinaigreries Dessaux. This unseen series composed of 7 photographs is a new step in the exhibition path of other fascinating places that the artist has focused on in the past years, as for example le Hameau de la Reine at the Château de Versailles, submarine bases of the Atlantic coast or le Palais Garnier in Paris. Starting from a historical residence, a military ruin or an industrial relic, Claire Adelfang stimulates the fascinating mechanisms of memory and her latest series on the vinegar factory will for sure captivate and surprise the audience, while enabling an almost philosophical approach to the challenges of the preservation of cultural heritage.
Claire Adelfang was born in 1984 in Paris where she still lives and works today. She studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where she joined the workshop of Patrick Tosani and graduated in 2009. Photographs and videos of Claire Adelfang have been discover- ed by the public during exhibitions held by the association Friends of l‘Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2010 and 2011. Her video Les Forges has been part of the Nuit Blanche 2013 at l‘Ora- toire du Louvre in Paris and in 2016 Claire Adelfang had an exhibition at Palais de Tokyo as part of Choices Paris. Le Musée de Versailles, la Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris et du Musée d‘Art Contemporain du Val de Marne have works by Claire Adelfang in their collection.
A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition featuring a text written by Matthieu Lelièvre, curator of the exhibition, and an interview with the artist and Étienne Hatt, writer and reporter forArtPress.
For more information: http://www.orleans-agglo.fr/330/le-musee-des-beaux-arts.htm
