‘Sleepless Hands’ Exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès

Since 2010, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès has invited visual artists to join in the annual Residencies programme, helping them to discover and produce new art works using the finest materials (silk, leather, silver, crystal), in collaboration with the workshop artisans. Curated by Gaël Charbau, the pieces produced by the nine artists are joined by other works found in their own portfolio.

“Alongside the works produced in the factories, the exhibition provides the possibility to discover other pieces from the artists’ corpuses, so as to show the context in which they are set, and to explore ‘the workshop gestures’ that produced such works: repetitions, the forcing of chance, inscriptions and ‘activations’ of the artist’s body,” Charbau explains.

 

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Inspired by the name of the exhibition, the freedom throughout the exhibition is clearly seen; the guest artists like Clarissa Baumann was the one who stretched a spoon in order to turn it into a long silver wire. Célia Gondol worked with abstract figures across forty metres of silk, Bianca Argimon deconstructed the shapes and colours of a pattern and DH McNabb inserted a kinetic motif inside a block of crystal. Lucia Bru poured cement into crystal, while Anastasia Douka questions the perception of machines as creatures and Lucie Picandet uses leather to depict the regeneration of the soul. While in a very Hermès fashion, Jennifer Vinegar Avery assembled textile off-cuts into a bestiary.