Exhibition Category: Previous Productions

Non-Effective Drawing is an invitation to physical and mental performance in the realization of drawing. The act of drawing is an effort, a complete investment of the body for a given time, a feat.

In 2000, Aurelie Nemours decided to create an annual prize that bears her name. The Aurelie Nemours Prize rewards any artist, regardless of his discipline, whose work pursues the rigorous and spiritual plastic quest that has been his. She wrote: “Thinking that art is a struggle against the disarray of our civilization, I firmly believe that the spiritual charge of art is the only recourse and salvation.” In 2024, the winning artist is Susanna Fritscher.

In the great tradition of naturalistic illustration, Suzanne Husky invites us to reconsider the deep time of rivers through the geopolitical history of alliances between humans and beavers. An epic adventure, conceived with the collaboration of the philosopher-researcher Baptiste Morizot, which teems with tasty sketches, and re-anchors us in a world vaster and more wonderful than that of human history: the great history of life.

For Noémie Sauve, inspiration always begins in contact with a field. This exhibition presents works from two scientific expeditions – Tara (2017) and Vulcano (2021). On site, she collects data, samples, colours and shapes. Back in the studio, by exploring multiple formats and techniques, between drawing, sculpture and chemical reactions of materials, she seeks to recreate the invisible and threatened worlds of corals or the incandescence of a volcanic stone. Noémie Sauve navigates freely and without hierarchy between the naturalistic and fantastic registers to create works that, in the mode of analogy and diversion, invite us to wonder and inquiry.

The exhibition Ser uma mistura, um desenho, um desejo (To be a mixture, a drawing, a desire) is born from the desire for mixture, from the desire for encounters, natures and the ordinary feelings that run through us. What is your favorite animal? Why do we hug an object while thinking of someone? What drives our desire to build memories on this planet?

In 2000, Aurelie Nemours decided to create an annual prize that bears her name. The Aurelie Nemours Prize rewards any artist, regardless of his discipline, whose work pursues the rigorous and spiritual plastic quest that has been his. She wrote: “Thinking that art is a struggle against the disarray of our civilization, I firmly believe that the spiritual charge of art is the only recourse and salvation.” In 2023, two artists will be rewarded: graphic designer Irma Boom and painter Hans-Jörg Glattfelder.

The Pulp-e project questions the construction of the image, in its reappropriation, in its writing, in its transposition, includes the body, in order to make us wander through possible narratives. The title refers to the specific typology of pulp (popular comics) and the addition of the E proposes a concrete meaning, the pulp. A hybrid title, the exhibition will present several states: scenarios, set elements, films. The popular and folkloric forms taken up and drawn by Benjamin Hochart will go beyond the framework of the sheet of paper and the Drawing Lab will become the theatre of a new narrative whose various scenarios will be activated by the spectator.

Karine Rougier, the 2022 Drawing Now Prize winner, offers a unique group experience in her 2023 solo exhibition at the Drawing Lab: “Nous qui désirons sans fin”. Awarded the Drawing Now Prize in 2022, the artist is taking advantage of this invitation to propose a real collective walk. From drawings realized with graphite or gouache to paintings, via watercolors, and from films to slideshows, her exhibition offers more than one story. This exhibition is a collection of stories by Karine Rougier and her special guests. Like a plunge into drawing, the exhibition invites us to play, pick a card and read a new world.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of this Prize, with a delay due to the pandemic, an exhibition is organised by the Aurelie Nemours Association with a choice of works by each of the laureates, presented in the rooms of the Drawing Lab, 17 rue de Richelieu in Paris from July 1 to September 21, 2022.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue and its opening will coincide in the same venue with the presentation of the 2021 prize to Pe Lang and Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri on 30 June 2022 by Mr Xavier Darcos, Chancellor of the Institut de France.

Irrespective of their subject matter, all drawings start with a dot, then a line to another, and so on. A bit like mapping a path from point A to point B. Which is also how humans connected the stars in the night sky. It’s how constellations were created, and the way they are still represented today.
Might star constellations not have been the first de facto abstract drawings?
Yet, still today, these celestial drawings situate our very bodies and individual identities. Between two fictitious points. Between two planes: the earth and the sky.
Series of points like these which are connected by lines, let us project ourselves into the future and imagine more intricate drawings or paths to follow. That is the starting point of Du Temps sois la mesure (“Of Time be the Measure”). A handful of strokes and dots whose intention extends beyond what we can see: a more extensive pictorial projection, a measure of space and time.