galerie laurent mueller

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed

The galerie laurent mueller is happy to launch STUDIO by inviting the artist Paula Doepfner to present a specially developed installation. Located on the first floor of the gallery, this space will be dedicated to an independent programme in parallel to the gallery’s. The ambition of STUDIO is to stimulate exchanges with invited artists and curators. Its smaller size shall lead to original projects and encourage a more intimist view upon contemporary creation.

Paula Doepfner explores the transformation of materials through drawings made with dried plants, ephemeral sculptures and performances. She is interested in the neurobiological mechanisms of how ideas and emotions are generated.

The installation presented at the galerie laurent mueller encompasses a series of works whose interaction questions the process of how conscience is being created. A bloc of ice hanging from the ceiling acts as catalyser. It encloses some extracts of the poem by Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, calligraphed in ink on hand made paper. This disposition, once launched, sets the timeframe of disappearance in which the exhibition functions. The transmutation of materials evokes the alchemy of emotions described by Whitman, as much as their ephemeral character.

A drawing overlays its cellular structure to a dried plant and small, indecipherable writings on the paper. They are extracts from a philosophical essay about the neuronal aspects of our conscience. This scientific approach enters in dialogue with the intuitive approach by Whitman. These various views of a single reality remind us of the difficulty to describe in neurological terms these partially unconscious phenomena.

As a counterpoint to these works which are branded by transformation, an sculpture made of glass sheets encloses pigments and dried plants, a mixture of moss and petals, which become one with the glass and emulate neuronal structures. The transparence of the object reminds us of the bloc of ice, but completely opposes it via its solid state.

Mechanisms of memory, biological phenomena of growth and the cycle of life in general are the surrounding ideas that Paula Doepfner uses to develop her work and this specific presentation, which alternates between moments of adherence, retention, as well as deprivation of materials.