Born 1962 in Paris
Lives and works in Paris

Agnès Thurnauer's paintings materialise the way the mind works when it tries to make connections between apparently unrelated objects and the meanings they may suggest. She treats the image like a place "in between", like a space for dialogue and not a defined boundary. Recollections of everyday journeys, images found in the street, and scraps of conversations and newspapers form a structure that materialises the spectator's experience of the work. For the Biennial, Thurnauer has created a set of works. A painting entitled XX Story (a nod to the female chromosomes), devised as a landscape in perspective, features feminised first names of the great male protagonists of art history from the 17th to 20th centuries; the series does not cover living artists. Two pictures entitled L'origine du monde (a reference to Courbet) address the issue of pleasure as duration, and of pleasure as necessarily occurring without a frame - such as the picture frame. One of the pieces features the barmaid from Manet's Bar des Folies-Bergères, the famous picture in which the spectator is physically reflected, so becoming her customer. In this relationship of emotions, Thurnauer has projected onto the barmaid's body a pornographic text formatted to last just as long as the picture - as if, until desire explodes, her thoughts are displayed on her body.