Artist Talk: Fanny Gicquel

Fanny Gicquel, winner of the Prix du Frac Bretagne – Art Norac 2023, will discusses her first solo-exhibition in Ireland, breathing with heels, walking eyes at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Light refreshments will be provided.

Fanny Gicquel’s tactile and adaptive sculptural environments refer to intimate and natural forms. Their individual components are codependent on one another, providing hanging or resting points where groups of objects and materials correspond and perform. Her installations are accompanied by situations of choreographed activation, imagined by the artist and carefully, yet playfully, enacted by performers. Contact, rearrangement and interaction with elementally changing materials (such as paraffin, vapour, tinctures of liquid, and heat-sensitive paint) are some of the discrete movements and gestures used to activate Gicquel’s work. This process allows Gicquel to explore the touching-point between the animate and the inanimate, outlining a moving and transitory landscape. Language permeates her materiality, and its entangled forms aid diverse readings. Gicquel’s exhibition in TBG+S will expand on her ongoing research on care and intimacy, and practices of movement and relationship, not only between surfaces and space but between individuals.

The Prix du Frac Bretagne – Art Norac aims to support Bretagne-based artists at an international level, by partnering with an international organisation to realise a solo exhibition for the awarded artist. In 2023, Frac Bretagne is collaborating with Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Fanny Gicquel’s exhibition is further supported by TBG+S through a production residency.

Fanny Gicquel lives and works in Rennes, France. Her recent solo exhibitions include Hua International, Beijing (2022) and Berlin (2021); the left place the right space, Reims (2020); Passerelle Centre d’art Contemporain, Brest (2020); and Unworlding, Frieze, London (2021).