The first-ever comprehensive overview of Maude Léonard-Contant's universe.
Maude Léonard-Contant's art intertwines language and matter. Naming and describing, selecting and processing materials allow her to foster intimacy with Things, both paying tribute to them and bidding them farewell. Listen, the crust is cracking presents the first-ever comprehensive overview of the artist's universe with over one-hundred images. Her acute awareness of how language shapes reality and her haiku-like notes form a common thread that runs through the publication. Texts from the perspective of art history and anthropology place Leonard-Contant's installations and objects in the context of feminist and political art history and expand the gaze to holistic, non-anthropocentric ways of life. The design of the book, with its perforated binding and distinctive typography reflects the materiality of Léonard-Contant's work.
Published on the occasion of Maude Léonard-Contant's exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern in 2023.
Born 1979 in Joliette (Canada), Maude Léonard-Contant lives and works in Basel (Switzerland). Her pictorial world avails itself, on the one hand, of language, the shape of letters and words, textual aspects, as well as transferences and gaps that can emerge between different languages. On the other hand, Maude Léonard-Contant's works are reminiscent of ceramic vessels and items of furniture, or else the artist offers a table at which to listen, think and work. She thus reflects on what we human beings are surrounded by on a daily basis, both mentally and physically. She measures up human beings' size and potential. She allows viewers to walk through a letter- or interior-landscape and while doing so discover deliberately placed details.
