Maude Maris: BLUE MILK

Pi Artworks Istanbul is pleased to present BLUE MILK,  a new body of work by Maude Maris. Paris based Maude Maris (b.1980) has created a series of works rooted around the ideas of vicinity, morphological symmetry and symbiosis in animal species.  Blue Milk will run between the dates 28 May - 26 June 2021.

BLUE MILK is the artists third solo show with Pi Artworks. Exhibition brings together the newly commissioned oil paintings in which she focuses on the animal figures as well as ideas around zoology and microbiology.

Maude Maris follows the same process as her previous works in the current exhibition; Maris first crafts miniature plaster animal figures as models, then sets a stage using these models, photographs and then transfers them on to her canvases. In this process, by her interventions on surface, shadow and depth, animal figures come to life in a state of transformation, in a floating, fluid and semi-abstract dimension dominated by reflection and symmetry.

Animal figures and forms are a subject Maude Maris has been working on for a long time. The artist's paintings and sculptures including animal figures on Mount Nemrut were featured in her previous solo exhibition Antique Romance (2016) at Pi Artworks Istanbul. In the BLUE MILK exhibition, Maude Maris's research on animal form, with reference to the work of American microbiologist Lynn Margulis and Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann deepens by focusing on concepts in relation with biosemiotic, non-addressed appearances, symmetry, vicinities between species, and symbiosis.
In the BLUE MILK exhibition, Maude Maris establishes a cosmological relationship between different animals whose species can’t be determined exactly and are not intended to be together. In the imaginary universe covered with the "Blue Milk" in which these animal figures exist, Maude Maris translates laws of symmetry and symbiosis of nature to painting. Becoming incarnate in painting made of sometimes smooth surfaces with fleshy textures and sometimes of mineral material, these animals are reunited here by unexpected inter-species friendships. Symmetry - evoking in these compositions the famous Rorschach ink test - is an almost systematic principle of external animal forms, contrary to the internal organisation of organisms. Its beauty, exempt of any organic function, perhaps offers the clues to an awareness of existence. From a more contemporary perspective, Maude Maris’s animal figures are modified and mutating creatures that belong to our changing and troubled world and yet they stand in a collaborative relationship.

Maude Maris (b.1980, Paris), works and lives in Paris. Selected exhibitions include; Hieromancie (solo), Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France (2021); White Spirit, Memento, Auch, France (2020); Equinoxes 1 (solo), Camille Fournet, Paris, France (2019); Who Wants to Look at Somebody’s Face? (solo), Pi Artworks London, UK (2018); Some of Us, an overview of the French Art Scene, Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Budelsdorf, Germany (2019); Souvenirs de Tethys (solo), Centre d’Art La Chapelle Jeanne d’Arc, Thouars, France (2018); Anatolian Studies (solo), Embac Chateauroux, Centre-Val de Loire, France (2017); O! Watt up - de Watteau et du Theatre, Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz, Nogent-sur-Marne, France (2017); A claire-voie (solo), Galerie de l’Etrave, Thonon-les-Bains, France (2016); Votive (solo), Saint-Ange Residency, VOG Art Center, Fontaine, France (2016); Antique Romance (solo), Pi Artworks Istanbul, Turkey (2016); Nemeton (solo), Musee des Beaux-arts, Rennes, France (2015); Along the Cornices, by Christian Aubert, Collector, Paris, France (2014) and Dreaming of Vertigo, Raising the Doubt, Artotheque, Caen, France (2012). Selected collections including her work; The Bredin Prat Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, France; Collection La Fondation Colas, Boulogne, France; Artotheque Espaces d’Art Contemporain, Caen, France; FRAC - Regional collections of contemporary art, Auvergne, Basse-Normandie, Haute-Normandie, France; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, France and Collection Emerige, Paris, France.