This catalogue documents Claudia Comte's project for the 2016 edition of the Printemps de septembre, based on a selection of 600 parts from the aeronautics industry.
In the former Bazacle hydroelectric plant, Claudia Comte designed and produced an immersive installation for these objects. Thierry Leviez's text puts the artist's intervention in the perspective of a genealogy, successively evoking seven exhibitions of objects, from the salons designed by Lily Reich for the Werkbund to the innovations of Philip Johnson at MoMA and up to the experiments of Richard Hamilton at ICA.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Espace EDF Bazacle, Toulouse, in 2016.
Since 2016, Thierry Leviez has been in charge of the exhibition program at Beaux-Arts Paris. Before that from 2012 to 2016 he was an exhibition curator of Printemps de septembre. He published a few monographic catalogues: “Jorge Pardo, display for the Museum les Augustins” (Hatje Cantz, 2018), “Per Kirkeby. Brick sculptures” (Cahiers d'art, 2017), Marion Verboom (Musée des Sables d'Olonnes, 2015). Since 2018 he teaches exhibition display at Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Claudia Comte (born 1983 in Grancy, Switzerland) is an artist based in the countryside outside of Basel, Switzerland. She works between media, often combining sculptures or installation with wall paintings to create environments where works relate to each other with a visual rhythm that is both methodical and playful. Her work is defined by her interest in the memory of materials and by a careful observation of how the hand relates to different technologies. Claudia Comte has been invested in understanding the relationships between different forms of life. Materials do not only have a memory, but they also possess a knowledge about the environments they belong to. Marble entails the ocean, and life under water is crystallized and it would be inaccurate to see this material as hard, since it is liquid at its core. Wood "remembers" the climate conditions of the planet and the forest that embodies the thousands of symbiotic processes that allow air, energy, breathing, growing, food, shelter. Claudia Comte's work opens our view to environment, oxygen, the way the conditions of our planet modify the materials—in every pattern and object.
Comte was awarded the Swiss Art Award in 2014 and with the Kiefer Hablitzel Award in 2012. She got supported by the UBS Foundation for Contemporary Art (Switzerland) in 2012 and won the Kulturförderpreis by Alexander Clavel Stiftung (Riehen, Switzerland) in 2018.
