Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present Gemini, the gallery’s third exhibition with the French artist Jean- Marie Appriou.
The story of life on Earth is a story of twins. Ever since the first organisms bubbled into being, tiny specks in a vast primordial soup, they have been splitting themselves in two. Billions of years later, even the largest creatures still begin life as single cells that divide into identical daughters. One becomes two, two becomes four, and eventually, these exponential broods become us.
The French artist Jean-Marie Appriou has a keen eye for the twins that shape our collective imagination: the kindred concepts and subtle dualities with which we make sense of the world. In previous exhibitions, Appriou has deftly illuminated the ways in which our notions of the prehistoric past and dreams of the distant future walk hand in hand. With Gemini, his new show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Appriou invites us to consider a different set of twins— poetry and sculpture—through the lens of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the French artist Auguste Rodin.
Jean-Marie Appriou was born in 1986 in Brest, FR, and lives and works in Paris, FR. Appriou graduated from École régionale des beaux-arts de Rennes, FR, in 2010. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Art Club #35, Villa Medici, Rome, IT (2022); Imagine, Artzuid, Amsterdam Sculpture Biennale, Amsterdam, NL (2021); The Horses, organized by Public Art Fund, Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York, NY, US (2019–2020); Seabed, Le Consortium, Dijon, FR (2019–2020); and Open Space #1, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR (2018). Appriou participated in Là où les eaux se mêlent, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, FR (2019) with a major installation titled Roncier. Selected institutional group exhibitions include Childhood: Another banana for the dream-fish, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2018); Neuer Norden Zürich, KiöR Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, Zurich, CH (2018); Deux sens du décoratif, Centre d’art Contemporain, Brest, FR (2018); Voyage d’Hiver, Château de Versailles, Versailles, FR (2017); Robots. Work. Our Future, Vienna Biennale, Vienna, AT (2017); MEDUSA, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, FR (2017); L’Usage des Formes, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2015); and La solitude, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, NO (2014). Jean-Marie Appriou opens a solo show with Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna in November 2023.