Mïrka Lugosi

Mirka Lugosi is in many ways an exceptional person, she has led several lives. She was born a few leagues from Dracula’s castle, in the heart of the northern Carpathian Mountains, and grew up in this hallucinatory setting, which today contributes to the charm and strangeness of her universe. An underground activist in the 1980s, she was an essential figure in the fetish scene, and a member of the experimental noise group, the Syndicate. She has published work in many magazines including Maniac with the photographer Gilles Berquet: she is Berquet’s model, muse and partner in life. Even though she likes to describe herself as a “painter of pictures” and practices gouache, inks on photographs, videograms and illustration, it is through drawing that Mirka Lugosi best expresses the complexity and subtlety of her oeuvre. Her maniacal line in ultra-fine graphite requires hours of work, painful toil, a physical ordeal that implies a certain masochism. Mirka Lugosi draws us into a world of objects, human beings and animals that merge, handled on an equal footing; a world that appears naive, yet transcends the erotic imagery to subtly and impertinently question our dreams, our impulses and our fantasies. The artist’s work is often confined to the erotic register and the conventions of that genre, but fits into a broader line of descent from the art of the 20th century (running from Hans Bellmer to Man Ray or Unica Zurn).

The exhibition at Palais de Tokyo concentrates on the presentation of a groundbreaking drawing. For that purpose the space is transformed into a dark corridor made from thick fabric partitions leading us to the work. In this dark, disturbing landscape it is neither a heroine nor animals that are drawn in graphite. The characters and the erotic charge of the artist’s work seem to have taken possession of nature itself. An attempt to project a generic woman, fanciful self-portraits or a gendered vision of an object of desire?

Lives, draws and poses in Paris.

PRESS RELEASE /LES MODULES - FONDATION PIERRE BERGÉ - YVES SAINT LAURENT

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