An overview and historical, critical, and theoretical perspective on the French artist's work.
"She gleans material culture and the surface of things—compelled by materials and their economies, chemicals and their properties, images and their histories, technologies and their translations, paranoia and its erotic reasonings—for the information of their transformations, that which slowly emerges, corroded or in bloom, in anxiety or in ecstasy, in eros or its advertisements."
—
Quinn Latimer
Mimosa Echard draws from biological research, the history of experimental cinema, and her personal biography to create works that intertwine sexuality, perception, and artifice.
Working across diverse media—from sculpture to installation and video games—her practice is shaped by continuous and often contradictory processes of absorption, accumulation, and circulation, which she traces across domains as varied as popular culture, metabolic systems, and electromagnetic phenomena.
Attentive to the invisible—or latent—potential of her materials, Echard's assemblages and installations probe the limits of language in apprehending her objects, opening space for unprecedented and non-normative associations.
The monograph
Mimosa Echard: Lies includes previously unpublished texts that invite readers to engage deeply, and from multiple perspectives, with Echard's practice. Essays by Amelia Groom and Devrim Bayar provide historical, critical, and theoretical insights; Daphné B. contributes a poetic introduction; and a dialogue between Mimosa Echard and
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster enriches the book with an artist-to-artist exchange. The volume also features a reprint of
Quinn Latimer's essay on Echard, originally published on
TextWork, the editorial platform of the Fondation Pernod Ricard.
Graphic designer Julie Peeters collaborated closely with Echard on the catalogue's design. Images accompanying the texts and themes developed by the authors are complemented by a series of photographs from the artist's personal archives—film-based documentation of her studio and exhibitions, published here for the first time. This opening section offers an intimate perspective on the processes of making and exhibiting. It is followed by a second part, which presents, in an inventory format, the "official" views of the exhibitions in their final form.
Mimosa Echard (born 1986 in Alès, France, lives and works in Paris) is graduated from the
École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. Her practice covers a wide range of processes. The artist carries out a work of collection and gleaning, both of natural materials and manufactured elements. She brings them together to make them dialogue, proceeding by contamination, associating the living and the non-living in a hedonic relationship, thus exploring the intermediate stages between the natural and artificial worlds. The resulting creations suggest both their own destruction and their development towards a new stage of evolution.
Mimosa Echard has enjoyed solo exhibitions at ACCA (Melbourne, 2020), Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund, 2019), École municipale des beaux-arts (Gennevilliers, 2019) and Cell Project Space (London, 2017), among others. She has also participated in several group exhibitions. Her works have been acquired by numerous collections, including: CNAP – Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris), Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette (Paris), Samdani Art Foundation (Dhaka), Ettore Fico Foundation (Turin),
IAC (Villeurbanne). Mimosa Echard was awarded the 2022 Marcel Duchamp Prize.
