Eve Koeppel's career is marked by exhibitions at prestigious venues such as the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and the San Jose Museum of Art in California, the Fondation Guerlain in Paris, the Exploratorium and Refusalon in San Francisco,...
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Eve Koeppel's career is marked by exhibitions at prestigious venues such as the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and the San Jose Museum of Art in California, the Fondation Guerlain in Paris, the Exploratorium and Refusalon in San Francisco, ARC Gallery in Chicago, the Market Theater in Johannesburg, and the Noga Gallery in Tel Aviv. Through her multiple origins and a life shaped by voluntary exiles, Eve Koeppel is as much from here as from elsewhere. This ceaseless movement is constitutive of her rich and varied body of work. Like a traveling anthropologist whose gaze decenters, she offers a practice that brings together what seemed foreign to us, and distances what appeared familiar. The boundaries between two countries, between the intimate and the ostentatious, between the hand of Man and that of nature, between the past, the present, and the future, are redefined and thus highlight the immanent paradoxes of Western society. This redefinition of the fundamental concepts of our civilization is reflected in her work through a breaking down of artistic disciplines. Video, music, photography, molding, ephemeral installations, and scents are tools and means to propose, at times, an aesthetic of science where the artist's rigor matches that of the lab technician, and at other times, an aesthetic of the aleatory where Eve Koeppel's hand becomes the intuitive and discreet director of living, free, and iridescent materials. Water, blood, milk, ice, sugar, wood, light, wax, plaster, fabric are then both objects of quasi-scientific experimentation and sometimes the very actors in her work. Eve Koeppel thus addresses themes of transmission, social violence, ecology, and maternity. Paul-Émile Aguerre 2024