CLÉDIA FOURNIAU
TEN TURNS

KÖNIG BERLIN
22 NOVEMBER – 22 DECEMBER 2023 

PUBLIC OPENING
21 NOVEMBER 2023 | 6–8 PM

KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present their first solo exhibition of the work of French artist, Clédia Fourniau. Consisting of 17 new paintings, TEN TURNS showcases Fourniau’s unique take on the language of non-representational painting. Saturated in vibrant yellows, meditative violets, and brazen neon greens, the works in TEN TURNS reveal the artist’s level of investment in the continued relevance of the abstract painted picture. 

For TEN TURNS, Fourniau offers her unique spin on the foundational elements of the painted medium: color, texture, surface, and frame. Each of these four components of the wall-hanging painted image is rendered both familiar and entirely new, energized with a vigor and levity that belies the weighty history of abstraction that stands behind them. Autonomous zones of color form the essential grammar of each individual work, though this is not hard-edged abstraction, instead Fourniau’s colored zones bleed into one another, both across a surface and beneath it, revealing the archival traces of previous layers and marks. For TEN TURNS, Fourniau painted on colored fabrics and patterned textiles, reinforcing the quality that her paintings build outward toward the shared space of bodily encounters, engendering movement akin to that which the artist used to first bring the works into being. There is something altogether reassuring and grounding about these paintings, in their ability to attract and absorb, to revel in their embeddedness, their soaked reality.

© Portrait by Romain Darnaud

While the dimensions of each work are determined based on the measurements of the studio door and the reach of Fourniau’s outstretched arm, one quality is maintained throughout: a radical openness and embrace of uncertainty. This extends into Fourniau’s decision to decorate each frame of the works on display, putting the boundary between the space of a given work and that of the viewer into permanent dialogue with one another. The unique state of quietude that each painting discloses is uncanny, as if a gentle hush emerges in the process of looking and moving: a powerful reminder of the once sacred space in which these works hang.

© Image KÖNIG GALERIE

The impulse to preserve some element of a given site’s specificity, as in the former Nave of St. Agnes, is also present in the titles of each of the works that comprise TEN TURNS, all of which begin with COLOMBES: the location of the studio the artist used expressly for the production of these works. In this sense, the paintings here are not only placeholders for the images they contain and radiate; the works are both composed, and reach out to, the sites where they were made and where they presently hang. Calling our attention to the frame, with great acumen and subtlety, is perhaps Fourniau’s nod to the centrality of place in her work, its coordinates and the memories that are contained by their boundaries. Painting is both bound and unbound, tethered to a particular environment, and yet completely open to the uncertainties of each new site.