Fitzpatrick Gallery is proud to announce Dépasser, opening on March twenty second at Maison Ozenfant, the primary villa designed by Le Corbusier in Paris. The exhibition will start the gallery’s program of exhibitions in site-specific places, and brings collectively the works of Beatrice Wooden (1893- 1998) and Irène Zurkinden (1909-1987), initiating a beforehand unexamined dialogue between the 2 artists, whose careers and lives unfolded alongside strikingly parallel trajectories following their youth in Paris.
The constraints positioned upon girls within the early 1900s—modesty, dependence, and societal restraint—had been circumstances that Wooden and Zurkinden categorically rejected. Separated by the span of a decade, each artists defied conventions of gender, class, sexuality, and age, forging unbiased inventive paths towards the prevailing currents of their time.
Born worlds aside—Wooden in San Francisco (1893) and Zurkinden in Basel (1909)—every was drawn to Paris of their youth, a transfer that proved decisive in shaping their inventive follow and ideological stance.
Wooden, whose dad and mom sought to mood her inventive impulses, was despatched to Paris to check theatre on the Comédie-Française and drawing on the Académie Julian; nonetheless, the outbreak of World Conflict I compelled her return to New York, altering the course of her inventive evolution.
In contrast, Zurkinden’s household actively inspired her pursuits, securing a grant that enabled her to check on the Académie de la Grande Chaumière within the late Nineteen Twenties. Immersed in Montparnasse’s avant- garde milieu, she launched her childhood good friend Meret Oppenheim to the Surrealist fold earlier than departing Paris on the onset of World Conflict II.
Although their direct encounters with Paris had been transient, the town remained a permanent presence of their inventive identities. Dépasser seeks to border these two pioneering artists round their Paris years. The exhibition’s setting—Maison Ozenfant, designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for artist Amédée Ozenfant—underscores the exclusionary buildings of the early modernist canon and the resilience required of ladies artists to navigate such areas.
Regardless of their differing backgrounds, each Wooden and Zurkinden arrived at comparable types of inventive autonomy. Wooden, a rebellious socialite in her youth, in the end fled her privileged life and turned to ceramics as a way of survival. Zurkinden, raised in modest circumstances, maintained a follow that spanned industrial and non-commercial work, but all the time remained financially unbiased. Their defiance of inventive and societal expectations was not only a matter of inventive expression however of lived expertise.
Whereas the 2 artists by no means crossed paths, their circles overlapped. Wooden’s proximity to Marcel Duchamp led to her changing into a key determine inside Dada’s experimental vanguard, incomes her the moniker Mama of Dada. Zurkinden, fluidly transferring between Basel, Paris, and Berlin, cultivated a radical inventive community, shifting between Surrealism and Neo-Impressionism whereas sustaining a definite visible language rooted within the uncooked power of her topics. Man Ray, a founding determine of Dada and the surrealist motion, serves as a direct connection between the 2; having photographed Zurkinden within the Thirties in Paris, whereas a long time earlier, in New York and later in Los Angeles, Ray frequented the salons of collectors just like the Arensbergs, the place Wooden was a outstanding fixture.
Theatre, too, formed each artists’ practices. Wooden’s background as a dancer and actress in New York knowledgeable the performative high quality of her work— its humor, exaggeration, and flamboyance. Even her iridescent glazes and decorative ceramics carry an inherent theatricality. Zurkinden, in contrast, approached her topics with a quiet however incisive gaze, privileging statement over spectacle. Her later work in set and costume design for Basel’s theatres additional mirrored her desire for working behind the scenes relatively than occupying the limelight.
Their private lives, very like their inventive practices, eluded typical narratives. Wooden, ever the iconoclast, spent a lot of her life in quiet defiance of her household’s prescribed notions of propriety— marrying thrice and remaining an irrepressible flirt properly into her centenary. Zurkinden approached relationships with the identical fluidity that outlined her inventive sensibility, participating in affairs with each women and men. Motherhood, nonetheless, left her caught between inventive ambition and maternal obligation—she moved between the avant-garde circles of Paris and the home pull of Basel, perpetually negotiating a life suspended between creation and care.
Wooden’s Et toujours pourquoi (1917) accommodates the phrases Impulse and Dépulse, the latter an invented time period, suggesting an interaction between compulsion and resistance, motion and constraint. Created throughout a interval of familial obligation in New York, the work hints at her longing to reclaim the inventive autonomy she first tasted in Paris. Zurkinden, too, imbued her work with poetic fragments: Le retour à la réalité comme un rêve dissipé. (…) Laisser le temps partir seul, ne même pas le suivre du regard ni du remorse. (The return to actuality is sort of a dissipated dream… Let time depart alone, not even following it with a look or a remorse.) These phrases encapsulate the artist’s perpetual movement, her refusal to be tethered to anybody place, id, or medium.
Neither artist remained mounted in a single place for lengthy, every embodying a stressed pursuit of reinvention. Although their time in Paris was fleeting, it marked their first experiences of true autonomy, setting the stage for his or her uncompromising careers. On this spirit, Dépasser—that means to surpass, or to exceed—displays their shared defiance of limits and their embrace of inventive and private freedom.
This ethos, and that of the artists’ peripatetic nature, mirrors Fitzpatrick Gallery’s personal evolution right into a nomadic mannequin, unfolding as an itinerant sequence of exhibitions worldwide.
at Maison Ozenfant, Paris
till April 6, 2025
