Presenting mostly oil paintings on canvas, Saint Fairy Anne continues the celebrated French artist’s exploration of colour, form, and the psychic life of objects. Bold, simplified shapes and linear motifs are ushered into dynamic compositional arrangements. Though often using graphic forms, the works maintain a distinctly analogue feel – the artist’s hand leaving a painterly finish and off-kilter verve. Mostly presenting work from the past five years, the exhibition also includes a 1998 still life, depicting a shell, a rock and a pair of pliers. The artist often uses her archive as raw material to be folded into her work, creating visual links and echoes across multiple decades, folding the past into the present to render them anew. 

The exhibition’s title, Saint Fairy Anne, offers a play on words: a phonetic Anglicisation of “ça ne fait rien”, or “it’s not important”. Along with the artist’s irreverent ink drawing on which it appears, it offers an injection of humour, playfulness and experimentation in art-making. 

Nathalie Du Pasquier
b. 1957, Bordeaux, France. Lives and works in Milan

Influenced by the language of classicism, Nathalie Du Pasquier’s paintings splice together simplified still-life compositions, architectural plans, industrial drawings, and playful fragments of text with boldly simplified blocks of colour. New objects constantly enrich Du Pasquier’s imaginary and symbolic world and she follows particular, poetic paths to construct and compose forms, sculpt space, and render representation anew. Intrigued by the relationship between objects and the spaces in which they are installed, Nathalie Du Pasquier’s work has manifested in paintings, sculptures, designs, patterns, constructions, carpets, books, and ceramics—constantly acting between the representational and non-representational, the tangible and intangible, reality and imagination, and two- and three-dimensional forms.