Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present Nathalie Du Pasquier’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Until 1987, she worked as a designer of patterns, textiles, decorated surfaces, objects and furnitures associated with the Italian design group Memphis. Since then, she has been devoting herself to painting while exploring the medium’s porous relationship with design. Her work is defined by an expansive approach to painting that encompasses sculpture, drawing, ceramics, carpets, wallpaper, typography and bookmaking. In her playful and sensuous installations, she devises structures of display where these elements come together, collapsing painterly space and architecture. 

With great care and attention, Du Pasquier arranges objects into intricate still-lifes. She brings these objects to develop complex yet playful relationships both in her handling of pictorial space, and in her consideration of paintings as tangible things. Throughout her work, she continuously constructs and deconstructs the boundaries of the frame in such a way that shapes which appear to be neatly contained for an instant, can, a second later, be seen populating the wall around the corner. In doing so, she fosters a sense adjacency that challenges the modernist precepts of abstraction and autonomy by reclaiming the “the decorative.” This notion of adjacency is no stranger to the way Memphis patterns were designed to move freely form one surface to another. 

Like maps of an interior world, her paintings distill the eclectic but precise influences that inform her perception—from Persian and French miniatures to Gabonese sign-paintings, from Giorgio de Chirico to Giorgio Morandi. For this exhibition, Du Pasquier conceived a new body of work that includes paintings and sculptural elements. The abstract shapes in her paintings form intimate constructions, echoed in the sculptural components and support structures that accompanies them, thereby blurring the line between the depiction, the model, and the painting as a quotidian object.

Nathalie Du Pasquier (b.1957, Bordeaux, France) lives and works in Milan. Recent solo exhibitions include: Twice in Dublin, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2022); Speed Limit, Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2022); Chez Eux, Villa Savoye Le Corbusier, Poissy (2022); Elementi per paesaggi, Mutina, Milano (2022); Campo di Marte, Musée Régional d’Art Contemporian, Sérignan (2022); Campo di Marte, MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome (2021); Il Treno per Brescia Viaggia con 5 Minuti di Ritardo, Galleria Apalazzo, Brescia (2021); the strange order of things 2, Pace Gallery, Geneva (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Geometric Opulence, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2022); Future, ancien, fugitif: une scène française, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019).