Agnès Thurnauer

One of the most recognized artistic voices of the French contemporary art scene, French-Swiss artist Agnès Thurnauer (born 1962 in Paris) has built an innovative body of work since the mid-1990s. She primarily explores language (words, meaning, reciprocity) through her paintings, sculptures, and installations. In her practice, writing is often incorporated in the picture—in many different expressive ways—and even when it is not, the allusive power released by the subject places the viewer within art history or contemporary concerns as in the endlessly renewed emancipation of their own reading and thinking. The visual quality of language is also tested in three dimensions with her sculptures made of casts of letters on different scales, permitting the involvement of both the gaze and the body.