Musée des beaux-arts de la Chaux-de-Fonds - Nina Childress Cils Poils Cheveux.

1. Nina Childress (1961), 996 - Karen nounours, 2018 Huile et poils 

sur toile, 114 x 195 cm, © 2022, ProLitteris, Zürich Courtesy de l'artiste

Beyond the hairs.

    For 40 years, the art of Nina Childress redefines and questions the western canon of representation, from popular culture to well-established symbols in paintings such as perspectives, portraits, landscapes and materials used in her work.

    Nonetheless, the body and most importantly the face is centrale to her work. The body is the most important and personal representation of the personality of the seater, between the outfit he wears to the expression he made. During the seating, the artist depicts well-know celebrities such as Patrick Juvet to whom an entire room is dedicated to total strangers, friends and persons which are important to her.

    The exhibition also focuses on the importance of the depiction of diverse body parts, and more precisely where the hair is located: head, mustache, armpit, etc. Most importantly, the haircut is important in her oeuvre, of course it showcase the evolution of the haircuts of the seater over the decades, but also the technique which uses the artist to represent it, in all of the details, shapes, colors and tools. 

    While looking at her works, you encounter works by other artists, some of them friend of Nina Childless and some reference to the artist such as Jean-Luc Blanc, Sylvie Fanchon, Franz Gertsch, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Caroline Tschumi, as well as Stéphane Zaech.

The layout.

2. Exhibition view of "Nina Childress Cils Poils Cheveux." by 

Gaspard Gigon for the Musée des beaux-arts de la Chaux-de-Fonds

    The exhibition at the Musée des beaux-arts de la Chaux-de-Fonds present the oeuvre of the artist in three sections: "Hair, hair, eyelashes" - "The contemporary portrait" and "Good and Bad paintings".

    The first section titled "Hair, hair, eyelashes" is an hommage to the most important themes and material used in her paintings. For the artist, it's deeply important to represent the human bodies, but not as a "gracious body" but as a normal body, with hairs and imperfections. 

    

    For the artist, the hair is one of the indices of our vitality and our personality. It also evokes the symbols of power and impurities. Nonetheless, it's also a personal story, between the fact that a girl "should" shades her body part to the evolutions in her hairstyle during the last decades, between the change of fashion and her own decision making.

    Nonetheless, the portrait and the people presented in them have a heroic and empowering depiction through the emphasis and attention given to their hair. His subject refocuses the hair, normally concealed, at the heart of his works.

    The second section of the exhibition focus on the genre of portraiture, which is an important tradition in the history of Western art. While portraits were originally created to give a physical trace to the people of the time, it's nowadays a prerogative, political and powerful tool which reflects the personality of the seater. 

    Nowadays, portrait is changing, it's more or less an everyday thing with the use of our smartphone and the selfies we post on social media. But it's not timeless like a painting.

    In her deeply personal painting, Nina Childress sketches her childhood and adolescent idols, painting a personal panorama of society, painting her "time capsule".

    The last part of the exhibition is dedicated to the "Good and Bad paintings" which is a series of works where the artist is more experimental by using phosphorescent paint and strange materials. For example the use of real brush hair or human hair, the use of a repetitive motif, shapes forms and colours, the limited color palette or the bright and fluorescent paint.

THE women

    The artist Nina Childress was born in 1961 in Pasadena, USA, from a French Mother and an American father. Wither her parents, she visited numerous exhibitions, theatre and traveled the world, while frequenting many artist of the art scene of the time such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

    Her way to painting was in her blood, her American paternal grandmother, Doris Childress (1909-2001), was a painter and her French maternal grandmother, Georges Breuil (1904-1997) was also a painter. After the divorce of her parents, she travelled back and forth between Europe and the United States.

    Since 1966, she has lived permanently in Paris. She decided to enter the Decorative Arts School in Paris in 1981, and to create a group of artists composed of Nina Kuss7 (vocals, organ) with Laul (bass), Masto (sax, drum, vocals), Raoul Gaboni (drums), the post-punk Lucrate Milk8.
    
    After many years in bands, she had a serious paragliding accident in August 1990. 19 years later, she's back into the art scene when the Frac Limousin invited her for a monographic exhibition which she named "La hatred de la peinture". That same year, Christian Bernard, director of MAMCO in Geneva, offered him an important personal exhibition called "Détail et destin".

    In 2019-2020, Nina Childress was appointed head of the studio at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, and the Ricard Foundation offered her a solo exhibition that same year.

    In 2021, Nina Childress was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for her career in the service of culture.

    Beside the exhibition, a few points need to be corrected to make the show better. First, more text should be added on the wall to descriptive the different "category" of the exhibition, but also to present the concept of the exhibition: why has Nina chosen those artists? Did she choose the works herself? Or the curator and director of the museum made the choice? 

    Concerning the program, it should be more varied, more guided tours should happen, especially in German or in English to attract more visitors into the museum. 

Informations about the exhibition

Place: Musée des beaux-arts de la Chaux-de-Fonds

Date: 6.11.2022 – 23.4.2023

Curators: David Lemaire

Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum

Informations about the Musée des beaux-arts de la Chaux-de-Fonds

Rue des Musées 33

CH-2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds

Phone: +41 32 967 60 77

Mail: mba.vch@ne.ch

© Lucas GASGAR / Lucas Art Talks 2023