Wild waves in our hands

Exhibition dates: June 1 – June 30, 2018
Opening reception: Friday, June 1, 2018 | 6-8PM

…a work disregarding conceptual vanity to honestly express the vicissitudes of our mysterious and pointless lives. – Dorothée Dupuis

Catinca Tabacaru Gallery is pleased to present Wild waves in our hands, a solo exhibition by Maltese-French artist Karine Rougier, on view June 1 – June 30, 2018.

Rougier is fascinated by hands; human hands, but not always so. These carry emotion; they are the first place for contact, and for drawing. A hand is an independent character: acting, holding, embracing bodies. Sharing wild feelings. Feeling the heartbeat. Miniature paintings and expressionist grigris abound in minute details make up this first solo show with the Gallery, which pushes us deep into emotional sensuality and mystical experience.

The story begins with the artist’s self-portrait lying naked on her studio floor; a mask covering her face, eyes closed, long-nosed​, third eye wide open. Oversized gloves shaped like hands run half-way up the arms of this 3-inch-long body. Surrounded by drawings, and rolling dice, a hand erotically rests upon her thigh. Can you feel my heartbeat, the piece asks, both in title – borrowed from Nick Cave’s song and Rougier’s experience with it live – and text as if embroidered upon the canvas.

Women are Rougier’s muses; poetry her nourishment: an ode to Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, les Métamorphoses d’Ovide. The power and strength in a gathering of women: the marches of this past year leaving permanent tracks around the globe; the march of Rougier and her friends descending upon New York, fire in their hearts, girls, girls, girls. That ferocious energy captured and translated into these works. The painting that lends its title to the show, Wild waves in our hands, depicts three women walking, eyes in the back of their heads, one holding an impaled human heart on a stick. Borrowed from Edward Curtis’s photograph, the “original” image depicted three Native American men. But, Rougier transformed them, much like the energy that gives you, the viewer, a mask to transform yourself.

More poem than novel, more music than narrative, made up of fragmented images and free-associations, of allusions and free-dives, the art of Karine Rougier is a vital breath which resonates with our tribal past and beats out time for the dance of the living. -Amélie Adamo

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Karine Rougier represented Malta at the 57th Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, and currently hangs in Quel Amour!? curated by Eric Corne at the Musee d’Art Contemporain (MAC) Marseille, after which it will travel to the Museu Colecao Berardo in Lisbon. Rougier lives and works in Marseille.