Donation of a work by Agnès Thurnhauer to the Museum of Grenoble

"I'm delighted to receive the donation of my painting Land and Language #3 to the Musée de Grenoble, thanks to the tremendous generosity of Nathalie Guiot. This painting is part of a series of five large-format works to be exhibited at the Fondation Thalie in 2020. The Musée de Grenoble is one of France's leading museums for painting, with a remarkable collection including Matisse's exceptional “Intérieur aux eggplants” and a unique series of paintings by Zurbaran. Thank you so much, Nathalie, for allowing my work to rub shoulders with that of the artists I love so much and with whom I interact on a daily basis, in the magnificent light and architecture of the Musée de Grenoble".

Agnès Thurnauer

'Land and Language # 3' (2019) echoes the great historical paintings in which the anonymous have taken the place of heroes. We are reminded of Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, whose diagonal composition seems to have inspired Land & Language's, or Pablo Picasso's Guernica, which, in 1937, abandoned the problematic of the painter and his model in the studio to devote himself to political painting. On a very large canvas, a chaotic interweaving of men's and women's arms and heads forms a chain of solidarity without beginning or end. This human chaos echoes that of Goya's terrible black series, which Agnès Thurnauer readily cites.

“This powerful series is made up of blocks of images that seem to have been cut out with a chisel, telescoping together,” she emphasizes. This sensation of telescoping is echoed in Land & Language. The Matissian-like cutting of shapes and the fluidity of the strokes give rise to blocks and oceans of color that collide as if under the effect of a cataclysm. The pure colors, applied straight from the tube, and the often strident contrasts also help to convey the violence of the migrants' situation, but also the drive for (over)life that is at work in this quest for a better world. The result is an incredible energy. The anonymous crowd in transit features a woman's arm raised in the air, an iconographic element of the uprising that so fascinates philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, and a distant echo of Delacroix's famous Liberty, but without the lyricism.

A Franco-Swiss artist born in 1962, Agnès Thurnauer has always been interested in the question of the relationship to the other, the relationship to the work, and how representation can change our perceptions. Educated in cinema but self-taught in painting, she has developed a singular pictorial language that weaves together figures and abstraction, text and image, using her own techniques and modalities, in a highly performative relationship to the space of the painting. For the artist, the relationship with the work always implies a form of reciprocity. If the work reads the world, it's up to each of us to make our own reading of it. This shared language is at the heart of society, and gives art a powerful poetic, political and visionary function.

In 2020, Agnès Thurnauer installed a perennial work, Matrices Chromatiques, at the Musée de l'Orangerie. In September 2021, a major public commission from the French Ministry of Culture in the urban space of Ivry-sur-Seine. Since 2022, she has had 4 solo exhibitions, notably at the LAM museum in Villeneuve d'Ascq and the Musée Matisse in Nice. In autumn 2024, she was exhibited at the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris and at the National Museum of World Writing Systems in South Korea. In 2025, Agnès Thurnauer had solo exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland and at the Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, focusing on the emancipation of 18th-century women through painting and writing.