L'Avancée Frederik Exner
L’Avancée is a hanging wall dedicated to emerging artists and a way of extending the exhibition space into the living space. During the year 21-22, the Pernod Ricard Foundation is partnering with the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris and the « exhibition professions » program. Every month, from October to July, a student is invited to take over the wall and to accompany his or her work with an exchange with the public.
Frederik Exner creates figurative sculptures in various materials.
Images, whether painted, sculpted or even sculptural, are essential in his work, taking precedence over questions of space, form and material.
Creatures, non-human beings, human-object and human-animal hybrids (etc.) often appear in his universe.
They fight, caress, invade, cuddle or penetrate each other; devouring themselves in an endless cycle that destabilizes the dualistic hierarchies between nature and culture, subject and object, reality and fiction, human and non-human.
These strange beings are emissaries of a non-human force and will; of a vitalist materialism that might suggest alternatives to anthropomorphic thinking.
A creature identifiable as frightening may be the frightened target of a force more powerful and less human than itself. The strange then appears to us as familiar.
The creatures in his work often carry the attributes of both prey and predator simultaneously. This contradictory and intrinsic relationship between subject and object is central to his work. A familiar object, such as a ladle, can be transformed into a rat that drinks its contents (itself) and thus cannibalizes its own function.
Frederik Exner was born in Denmark in 1991. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts in 2019 and then moved to Paris. He was in residence at the Villa Belleville, then at DOC before returning to the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021 in the studio of Tatiana Trouvé.
Image : Installation view, (c) Frederik Exner