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28/2/2014

Peter Downsbrough

Musee Regional d'Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon, Serignan

Curator Hélène Audiffren

Peter Downsbrough has examined language and constructed space since the mid 1960s. He leads a very personal and extremely thorough search which consists in structuring the space and creating discreet yet clearly visible volumes.

He uses a refined plastics vocabulary, made from simple geometric figures, lines, words and painted surfaces. His numerous artistic practices - sculptures, photographs, mural works, books, films, publications, sound works, urban space interventions - are based on the concept of position, sequence, interval and frame, and question the viewpoint.

The combination of linguistic and geometric elements thus formalises spaces leading to a plethora of interpretations.

The exhibition presented at the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Museum of Contemporary Art in Sérignan, the largest ever presented in France, will highlight the full extent of his work. Peter Downsbrough intervenes in the museum forecourt, then from the entrance through the bookshop and along the corridor to guide us around the exhibition space.

He installs metal pipes that fall from the ceiling to graze the floor, hangs letters, and traces lines of black adhesive tape to create an astonishing sensation of volume while allowing the gaze to penetrate. His process of optical cutting, refocusing, suggests a new understanding of the space. The scattered words, short speech (encore, là, et, vers, as, but, and...), encourage a search beyond the visual field. His interventions reveal open intervals which change according to the view point.

Several new sculptures with geometric forms, made using previously established construction principles, take on his concerns with the full and the empty, notions of situation and context.

An extensive set of his photographic series, presented mostly in the form of diptychs or triptychs, highlight the construction of urban space through his framing work. A selection of his films explore the possibilities of the discontinuous and flows through the use of travellings and the variation of viewing angles. His still and moving images are as much readings of architectural structures as functional structures of the city.

The exhibition is supplemented by a presentation in the graphic arts exhibition room of his multiple prints and many books (he has produced 101), in which the graphic and typographic arrangements always derive from the same mechanisms.

All of Peter Downsbrough's works evoke place, placement and displacement. They result in a relationship, offering the viewer to take up a position: "the pieces are not 'objects' but rather elements which engage the subject in a dialogue".

A publication enriched with text by Raphaël Pirenne will be released for the exhibition.

Two accompanying exhibitions are dedicated to the artist at the Galerie Martine Aboucaya and the Galerie des Multiples. Architect by training, Peter Downsbrough was born in 1940 in New Brunswick (USA). Lives and works in Brussels (Belgium).

From his debut in 1969, he has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the USA.

Image: AND, 2009. Painted metal, 155 x 22 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris. Photography J-P Planchon.

Press contact:
Sylvie Caumet caumet.sylvie@cr-languedocroussillon.fr
Isabelle Durand durand.isabelle@cr-languedocroussillon.fr

Preview Saturday 1st March 2014 at 6:30pm

Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Museum of Contemporary Art
146 avenue de la Plage - BP4 - 34410 Sérignan
Open Tuesday to Friday from 10am to 6pm, and weekends from 1pm to 6pm,
Closed on Mondays and public holidays.
Admission:
€5 normal price
€3 reduced price: groups of more than 10 people, students
Free: Art and architecture students, under 18s, journalists, job seekers, recipients of Minimas Sociaux (French state benefits), members of ICOM.

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