The Infinite Woman (English Edition)

Exhibition Catalogue The lnfinite Woman, presented at The Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles (April 27, 2024 - November 3, 2024).

Here, art liberates women's bodies from Western beauty canons, offering reinvented models that challenge not only social norms, but also the limits of art itself as well as its oppressive categories.

Organised thematically, the exhibition draws on ideas of myths and monsters in the representation of women to reflect on womanhood in all its many guises. Moving surefootedly between images of goddesses to scrutinizing the idea of the femme fatale, from disruptive ideas of motherhood to paying homage to the power of women’s desire, from beguiling fairytale creatures to cyborgs highlighting their emancipatory potential, to elevating (dis) obedient bodies that upend Western conventions of beauty while reflecting on the body as vessel, the exhibition closes with a section devoted to sirens and anti-icons to explore how gender is shape shifting in the 21st century. Ultimately, the works in the exhibition disrupt conventional ideas of womanhood to reflect on feminine power and how the representation of women has shaped global cultural attitudes.

Bringing together over sixty artists from different historical periods, geopolitical spaces and aesthetic currents - and with plural gender identities, the exhibition offers a dialogue between contemporaries such as Wangechi Mutu, Lisa Yuskavage and Michael Armitage and major historical artists including Louise Bourgeois, Egon Schiele and Judy Chicago. Using techniques as varied as painting, drawing, photography, video, collage, sculpture, ceramics and textiles, the artists conjure up new fantasies and give life to new female narratives, imbued with power (ORLAN, Martine Guttierez, Zanele Muholi) and pleasure (Laure Provost, Betty Tompkins, Dorothy Iannone, John Currin).