For Saint Fairy Anne, Nathalie Du Pasquier presents recent paintings within her custom exhibition design. Bold shapes and linear motifs create dynamic compositional arrangements, extending from the canvases into the installation that houses them, blending still life with architectural forms and flat planes of colour. Taking a fluid and porous approach to traditional distinctions between ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ arts, Du Pasquier is interested in “how display changes perception, how coloured walls influence the paintings, [and] how the viewer enters a mood”.

Complimenting these recent works, Saint Fairy Anne includes a 1998 still life, natural things and a plyer. Here, objects appear oversized and floating in space, bestowing an almost talismanic charge to the flotsam of an artist’s studio. Chosen intuitively for this presentation, the work demonstrates the broad shifts that have taken place in Du Pasquier’s practice over the past two decades. We move from “paintings of things”, in which three-dimensional objects are arranged in two-dimensional space, towards “paintings as objects”, where form and perspective are broken down and reconfigured, generating a more fluid relationship between colour, form and spatial dynamics. Even when returning to still life paintings, as in two 2024 paintings exhibited here, the focus is on outline, with radically simplified forms echoing the artist’s shift towards abstraction.

The exhibition’s title, Saint Fairy Anne, offers a play on words: a phonetic Anglicisation of “ça ne fait rien”, or “it doesn’t matter”. Along with the artist’s irreverent ink drawing on which these words appear, it offers an injection of humour, playfulness and experimentation in art-making. Though often using graphic forms, Du Pasquier’s paintings maintain a distinctly analogue feel – the artist’s hand leaving a painterly finish and off-kilter verve.

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.