The exhibition of Perrine Lacroix’s work is the first time Kunsthalle Krems presents an artistic position from the AIR - ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Lower Austria programme. The exhibition acts as the beginning of a new series, which, once a year, will provide exciting insights into the strategies and working methods of international artists who have enjoyed a scholarship in Krems.
Based in Lyon, the artist Perrine Lacroix has already garnered international attention with her multimedia installations in several solo and group exhibitions. She has run the arts center La BF15 in Lyon since 2004 and is thus actively involved in the international network of contemporary art. She stayed in Krems as part of her AIR - ARTIST IN RESICENCE Lower Austria scholarship in April of 2017.
Inspired by her stay in Krems, Perrine Lacroix’s work at Kunsthalle Krems deals with the basic requirements for exhibitions as well as the layer of meaning in pictures and objects. To what extent is context or knowledge needed to interpret pictures, if one even considers this relevant at all? The artist got to know the city of Krems, its surroundings and peculiarities via the photographic medium. The public space, in particular, is the focus of her art. Using a camera and video camera, she captured the Kunsthalle Krems’ construction in her work. It was being renovated during the period of her stay. Photos and videos of the renovated, empty showrooms point towards the aura and strong impact of work, whilst also drawing attention to the void.
The extent to which Perrine Lacroix deals with the concept of reality and its portrayability or rather its representation in an exhibition, is shown in Krems with an object she has serially placed, and which in turn refers to her 2017 residency in Krems. Lacroix discovered an object in the Krems Museum: the so-called Venus (also Fanny) of Galgenberg, a tiny prehistoric statuette found near Krems, which is one of the oldest known Venus figurines. Krems, however, only has a copy. The original is housed in Vienna’s Natural History Museum. Replicas can also be bought in museum shops. Lacroix places three of them in the first room of her show, illustrating how cultural goods become widely available through marketing, thus letting the viewer question the value of an original.
Perrine Lacroix has also designed an installation of monochrome rectangular surfaces for her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Krems that show abstractions of events from the time of the Second World War in Krems. The coloured surfaces act as a pictorial commentary. In her research on Krems’ history she inevitably came across Krems’ “Hasenjagd” (hare hunt) that took place on 06.04.1945, and marks the hunting and mass shootings by National Socialists of just-released (mainly political) prisoners from Krems’ detention center “Stein”. Lacroix conducted a Google Image Search for the date and discovered that if the Internet connection is slow, the results first appear as coloured boxes in the results. These are, so to speak, the voids of image realities and their contents, which are algorithmically provided by Google. For Perrine Lacroix, these blanks represent the complex problem of attributing meaning to things and also the fundamental question of what images can even convey. She has developed the idea of a memorial from this, which she transforms into a room installation at the Kunsthalle Krems, also in a wallpainting in the Stadtpark Krems.
Curator: Andreas Hoffer
Credit
Google search AVRIL 45 KREMS, Wallpaintings, various dimensions © Perrine Lacroix
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