We are delighted to announce the opening of Franziska Furter’s second solo exhibition at the gallery: Bow Echo.

The artist will be presenting new works demonstrating a broader approach to drawing, produced during her residence at the Cité des Arts in Paris. She is also inaugurating a Module at the Palais de Tokyo on 1 April (until 2 May).

The term “bow echo” refers to the bow-shaped path of a certain type of violent thunderstorm. And yet the expression suggests sonority. The association between visual form, a climatic phenomenon and sonority conjures up an intense and heterogeneous universe.

The title of Franziska Furter’s installation at the Palais de Tokyo, Squall Lines, prompts a similar interplay of connections. Borrowed from climatology, the term refers to a line of thunderstorms. Here again, climate goes hand in hand with a reference to shape. Franziska Furter explores the perimeter of interior and exterior states, producing graphic equivalents of the meeting between the atmospheric and the soul: together the storm, echo, arc and line produce a sensation of waiting, a temporal elasticity, suspension. This tension can often be found in the artist’s previous drawings of monochrome landscapes, which borrow motifs from mangas and science fiction. But whereas the artist used to reproduce them in their entirety (removing characters and dialogues), she is currently more concerned with form.

Recently, she has used graphic translations of moments of intensity experienced by the characters, representing these by explosions, stars or rough abstract shapes. In the Drafts series, the artist reproduces enlargements of these epiphanic motifs, but allows herself to reshape them.

Franziska Furter has long been interested in the relationship between image and scanning or printing errors; she is now improvising and moving away from the initial motif. The works - made with graphite - are altered depending on the spectator’s position: from afar they make up an overall image, the symbol of which is almost recognisable, and which our brain organises as we contemplate them; when seen up close they dilate and reveal their matter. Through form, Drafts brings very distant universes closer together. The series calls to mind both art’s classic symbols and graphic outlines.

The title Bow Echo refers precisely to this: the interior and exterior surfeit that nudges us into an altered state. Franziska Furter’s work is inhabited by drawing but extends into the space, which she often uses as a surface. Her works on paper sometimes encompass sculptures or pieces on the wall.

In Bow Echo Franziska Furter presents two installations that respectively transform the wall and the floor of the gallery into a drawing. In the first, the wall is used as a surface, with a line traced across it and tied in a knot made from silver leaf applied to the wall. Between thread and line, volume and drawing, this work has a simple and effective beauty and gleams according to the position of the light and the spectator. It is evanescent and has an undeniable beauty. The work on the floor is just as enigmatic and is akin to the installation at the Palais de Tokyo. In the second room, the floor is black and strewn with little stones, also black and shiny: the floor is covered with a dark-coloured carpet, on which have been sewn metallic black sequins. Positioned more or less chaotically, they call to mind an explosion or a celestial movement witnessed from afar. There is a sort of latent beauty in the installation, which draws a contemplative gaze towards the ground. For Squall Lines, the black carpet covers thin layers of glass, which shatter with each step. The artist invites us to experiment with the boundary between sensation and vision. Whereas Drafts proposes close-ups of previous motifs, these pieces seem to make us hesitate between the feeling of being in one of the drawings - which are almost invariably black - and of contemplating a celestial phenomenon, unknown to us but whose beauty thrills us.