If life hangs by a thread, it is death that Claire Morgan suspends by its threads – the very same threads, adorned with bird skins, that compose her latest mobile, entitled Song. A whimsical title for a funereal work with the air of a memento mori: a garland of dead birds as ravishing as it is terrifying. For though they are hollowed out, the hanged birds have retained the luster and vibrancy of their plumage… “I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead”: such is the title of Claire Morgan’s new exhibition presented at the Karsten Greve gallery (in Paris after Cologne) 1.
It contains all the poetry and delicacy of the Irish artist's latest works, who constantly speaks of "our vulnerability" and "our own unease with the impermanence of all things in life."
© Claire Morgan Studio / Photo: John McKenzie – Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Cologne, Paris, St. Moritz
Surrounded by dead birds, like a prophetess of "the era of mass extinction into which we are entering," the naked and already bloodless woman
Enthroned at the center of her installation, The Inevitable Heat Death of the Universe appears as a true allegory of destruction. In other works, this same naked woman, modeled in wax or drawn in pastel, appears adorned with a protective and regenerative fox skin: in Claire Morgan's work, the boundary between death and life is always tenuous.
A disturbing intimacy is at work in his latest drawings, which blend watercolor and pencil with bodily fluids collected during the process.
taxidermy…
1 Title which is also that of the illustrated book presented in the exhibition, a work composed of seven drawings and of
two handwritten texts forming a dialogue between a living woman and a dead fox.
CLAIRE MORGAN I ONLY DARED TO TOUCH YOU ONCE I KNEW THAT YOU WERE DEAD »
KARSTEN GREVE GALLERY
5, RUE DEBELLEYME, PARIS 3RD
UNTIL JANUARY 6, 2024
GALERIE-KARSTEN-GREVE.COM
