Anne Mourier
US, born 1963
Anne Mourier is a French-born and Brooklyn-based conceptual artist. She also holds a studio in the Berkshires, Massachusetts.
Her work explores the search for identity through an ongoing analysis of societal conceptions of femininity and constructs of home. She favors photography and sculpture as mediums but also does installation art and performance art. Refined combinations of readymade objects comprise an aesthetic vocabulary of soft pastel tones, subtle textures, and allusions to decorative arts, all undercut by historical references that expose the real and imagined parameters around the individual, the woman, and the human condition. Mourier’s work strives to supplant these parameters with unifying and connective ideas of what it is to be human.
Drawing from a childhood of invisible mothers and family secrets, Anne Mourier’s works of delicate and quiet handmades, readymades, and personal keepsakes are vessels for the introverted voice of her reflections on youthful naïveté. Their pristine pastel and white palettes invoke a dialogue that questions the cleanliness of the family construct, the gratification of the domestic domain, and the power of denial. Mourier questions whether society is holding onto the past or if we should burn it and begin anew. She believes there is healing in the simple pleasures of domestic life; in the act of taking care of things and one another.
Mourier has most recently exhibited at Galerie Huit with a solo exhibition X, exploring the relationship of water and femininity in different cultures and religions using close-up and detail photographs taken throughout the region of her native Arles, France. She mounted her first large-scale installation, Maries, in 2016 at the Chapelle de l’Ortial, in Normandy, France, to which she returned the next year to create her first permanent outdoor sculptural installation Alma Mater, a dense network of dead vines that covers a massive wall on the Chapelle’s grounds that Mourier painted by hand. In 2015, she exhibited Marys, a body of work extracted from the biblical archetypes of the whore and the saint, at the CAOS Art Gallery in Venice, Italy, during the Biennale. Her first solo exhibition was held in 2013 at the Glass House at The Invisible Dog Art Center, a free-standing structure Mourier designed to host her work.
Her 2017 performance Taking Care suggested through public participation that the simplicity and nostalgia of domestic chores are part of our collective consciousness, and completed its second iteration at the Brooklyn Central Library. The same year, Mourier exhibited her largest creation yet, Elevation, at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. This body of work contemporizes religious imagery to discuss the resurgence of feminine values.
Mourier published Maries, a monograph of her work of the past ten years, its origins, and the process it derived from, in June 2017, which has since been accepted into the MoMA Library and is also for sale at MoMA.Most recently, Mourier’s work was acquired by Robert Wilson of the Watermill Center.
