January 24 — April 20, 2025
Tatiana Wolska, winner of the 2024 Drawing Now Prize
Curated by Marianne Derrien
The exhibition Belladonna by Tatiana Wolska (born 1977 in Poland, lives and works in Brussels) nestles between the political and the intimate by offering a physical and cognitive experience where drawing merges with sculpture. Witches' plant, good or magic weed known since Antiquity, Belladonna, is both the remedy and the poison reminding us that its use requires subtle handling as well as great knowledge. Through the history of this plant, the exhibition promotes proliferation and dialogue in order to unite the familiar and the strange, lightness and ardor, suggestion and claim.
Tatiana Wolska's graphic and volumetric works mutate into so many probable or undefined organic envelopes. By restoring value to what does not last, the artist asserts an experimental and committed posture with this new work-construction in paper (torn, cut and stapled) alongside other works already produced. From the outside to the inside, from one body to another, from the plant to the human, it is our relationship to life cycles, to uprooting as well as to forms of emancipation and emancipation that is probed.
Throughout this project, stories and exchanges mingle and intersect to create the archive of a presence, that of the artist herself with those of other artists, activists, writers...
Marianne Derrien
Curator of the exhibition
#belladone
@drawinglabparis
Tatiana Wolska, Untitled, 2024, pencil on paper, 150 x 150 cm. Photo credit: Amélie Bataille, © Courtesy of the artist and the Irene Laub gallery.
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The artist
Portrait of Tatiana Wolska © Will Pace
Courtesy of the artist and the Midlands Arts Centre
Tatiana Wolska
Born in 1977 in Poland, lives and works in Brussels
Tatiana Wolska develops a multidisciplinary practice characterized by organic growth and the proliferation of forms. His drawings and sculptures, linked by a constant dialogue, bear witness to a research on the sinuosity of curves, the emergence of organic elements and the hybridization of objects. Plastic bottles, nails or wood scraps are all matrix substances at the service of a movement of amplification and growth. Tatiana Wolska's drawings evoke the living (plants, muscles, organs, hair, or micro-organisms) and place the question of the body at the center of her concerns. Flirting with the invisible and the intimate, she deploys a universe on the border between reality and abstraction.
Tatiana Wolska began her artistic career at the Villa Arson in Nice. Winner of the Grand Prix at the Salon de Montrouge, she was invited by the Pierre Bergé Foundation for a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014. Since then, his work has been regularly shown by international institutions, including the Frac Corse and the Frac PACA (FR) in 2016, the Villa Empain in Brussels (FR) and the Arsenal in Poznan (PL) in 2018, the Villa Datris in Paris (FR) in 2020, the Château de Chamarande (FR) or the Sculpture in the City project in London (UK) in 2021. IN 2024, a solo show was dedicated to him at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham (UK). She was also part of the group exhibition Rebel Garden on the occasion of the Triennale in Bruges (BE) and the sculpture exhibition ARBOS in Lustwarande, Tilburg (NL).
Tatiana Wolska is represented by the Irene Laub Gallery in Brussels.
The Commissioner
Portrait Marianne Derrien © Salim Santa Lucia
Marianne Derrien
Marianne Derrien is an independent curator, art critic and teacher, member of C-E-A and AICA France. After having been in charge of exhibitions at the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Medici, she now collaborates as a guest curator with museums and independent venues in France (Mrac Occitanie in Sérignan, Cité internationale des arts, Le Wonder, Mac Val...) as well as internationally (Mudam in Luxembourg, Unosunove in Rome, Wooyang Museum in South Korea, Plataforma Revolver in Lisbon, The Pill in Istanbul...). She teaches in the Master's degree in Exhibition Sciences and Techniques at the Sorbonne School of Arts and regularly publishes critical texts on both emerging and established artists. Since 2020, she has been in curatorial residency at Wonder, a place self-managed by artists in the Paris region to carry out several curatorial projects (Humain autonome) as well as publishing projects (Some of Us, Manuella Éditions) and co-founded the curatorial platform Fluidlabor, an independent and productive structure. In 2023, she is the winner, with the artist Eva Nielsen, of the BMW Art Makers program as part of the Rencontres d'Arles and Paris photo.
The Drawing Now Prize
The Drawing Now Prize has been supporting contemporary creation for 13 years and highlighting the pioneering role of galleries, by rewarding the work of an artist presented on the gallery stand during the Drawing Now Art Fair.
The Drawing Now Prize consists of 5,000 euros in endowment, 10,000 euros in production support, a 3-month exhibition at the Drawing Lab and the publication of a monographic catalogue. The selection of the nominees and the winning artist was made by the members of the fair's selection committee, composed for the 2024 edition of: — Joana P. R. Neves, Artistic Director of the fair;
— Hélène Guenin, Director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Nice (MAMAC);
— Carole Haensler, Director of the Museo Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona and President of the Association of Swiss Museums;
— Anita Haldemann, Deputy Director and Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Kunstmuseum Basel;
— Catherine Hellier du Verneuil, Art historian and collector;
— Pascal Neveux, Director of the Picardy Regional Contemporary Art Fund;
— Philippe Piguet, Art critic and independent curator.
Winners of the Drawing Now Prize since its inception in 2011:
Catherine Melin (2011), Clément Bagot (2012), Didier Rittener (2013), Cathryn Boch (2014), Abdelkader Benchamma (2015), Jochen Gerner (2016), Lionel Sabatté (2017), Michail Michailov (2018), Lucie Picandet (2019), Nicolas Daubanes (2021), Karine Rougier (2022), Suzanne Husky (2023) and Tatiana Wolska (2024).
The artist's universe
