If life hangs by a thread, it's death that Claire Morgan hangs on her strings - the same strings that, trimmed with bird skins, make up her latest mobile entitled Song. A playful title for a funereal work that resembles a memento mori: a garland of dead birds as ravishing as it is terrifying. For although they've been hollowed out, the hanged birds have kept the gleam and vivacity of their plumage... "I only dared to touch you once. I only dared to touch you once I knew that you were dead" is the title of Claire Morgan's new exhibition at Galerie Karsten Greve (Paris, after Cologne) 1.
It contains all the poetry and delicacy of the latest works by the Irish artist, who never ceases to speak of "our vulnerability" and "our own discomfort with the impermanence of everything in life."
© Claire Morgan Studio / Photo: John McKenzie - Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Cologne, Paris, St. Moritz
Wreathed in dead birds, like a prophetess of "the era of mass extinction 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 veritable allegory of destruction. In other works, the same naked woman, modeled in wax or drawn in pastel, appears clothed in a protective, regenerating fox skin: for Claire Morgan, the boundary between death and life is always tenuous.
A troubling proximity at work in her latest drawings, mixing watercolor and pencil with bodily fluids recovered during the
taxidermy process...
1 This is also the title of the illustrated book featured in the exhibition, comprising seven drawings and
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 "
GALERIE KARSTEN GREVE
5, RUE DEBELLEYME, PARIS 3E
UNTIL JANUARY 6, 2024
GALERIE-KARSTEN-GREVE.COM
