marie pierre MOREL

Exhibitions

2018

Curiosa,

Academic studies of nudes for Lou Jeunet’s film about Pierre Louÿs and Marie

galerie SIT DOWN

March 26th – May 25th 2019

One, marie pierre Morel, is a photographer, the other, Lou Jeunet, is a filmmaker.
Both had the common desire to take a feminine look at the studio nude, both in the female and male form.

The photographs taken by the writer Pierre Louÿs of his mistress Marie de Régnier in 1898 are the bases of the project. They are striking in their audacity and their modernity. On her back, sitting, lying, looking straight into the lens or having fun behind her hair, Marie de Regnier is a model that has something to say. When Marie invites Pierre to photograph her in the conjugal apartment in the absence of her husband, who is staging? Is it he or is it she?

The mystery of these photographs gave birth to a film, Curiosa with Noémie Merlant, Niels Schneider, Benjamin Laverhne and Camellia Jordana.
On the occasion of the film’s release on April 3, the Sit Down Gallery will present the director Lou Jeunet’s installations in entomology boxes, containing the objects of the film – photo albums, photo novel, poems and little post office blues- while marie pierre Morel exhibits a photographic set of nude studies preparatory to the film.

The Académie series is a tribute to the classics of the genre: the studio model is regarded as a sculpture, the face disappears to not distract from the body, as the form is its own end.
Inspired by the work of Pictorialism photographers such as Robert Demachy or Edward Steichen, marie pierre Morel is using a photographic chamber. The photographer is interested in the decomposition of the movement, variations around the same theme.

The proofs are numbered and drawn by the artist herself in soft engravings, allowing it to obtain a skin-like feel thanks to the quality of the paper and the work of inking and in the blacks that she would not obtain with a traditional photographic print.
Also included in this exhibition, what marie pierre Morel titled Les Petits Nus taken during the tests made for Lou Jeunet with her actors. With the contemporary bodies of young actors, we find the poses of the models of the past, the masculine academic nudes, the female odalisques.

Some reproductions of the photographs of Pierre Louÿs of the collection of the BnF are also presented in the exhibition helping us appreciate what Pierre Louÿs named in a letter to his brother George Louis as “these small things that one clings onto, like a passing glance … “

Biography

marie pierre Morel lives and works in Paris as an independent photographer, sharing her time between press and publishing.

Along with this discipline, she creates personal work which she exposes regularly.
Her first exhibition, in 1988, The Saints of Paradise, was selected for the Month of Photography and exhibited at the Galerie de Lappe in Paris.

In this field, she illustrated in The Song of Songs in 1993 with still lifes drawn in kallitypie, a work exhibited in Paris at Galerie du Roule.

MASSACRE, around the ancient statuary, a series still in progress, was born in 2000: the photo is embossed, as if it is tattooed with a word that appears and disappears under the bending of the light. With the diptychs and triptychs of Morceaux, she confronts large format color prints of Vesuvius with the relics of Pompeii in black and white.

In 2001, she moved to New York City on the Queen Mary for a Motionless Journey and landed in New York eight days before September 11th, using both video technology and pinhole archaism that resulted in a self-directed exhibition at House 19 .

In this more intimate vein, the graffiti pinholes of The Traces and Trees series in 2009 are selected by the HSBC Prize Jury.

In 2013 she exhibited the Wire of Japan at the Caroline Tresca Gallery, a series combining pinhole photography, monotype and calligraphy.

Since 2014, marie pierre Morel has been working on a set that she calls HORSTEMPSwhere she explores and reinterprets the classics she loves, alternating still lifes, abstract compositions and nudes.

The photographer draws these prints herself in photogravure, a process similar to heliography, which allow her to intervene manually on the print, thanks to intaglio printing.

In 2018-19 some nudes were exhibited at the Museum of Valencia according to a scenography by Philippe Model called Reflections of a collection revisiting the works which were kept in reserve.

Press

France Fine Art : Anne-Frédérique Fer
Elle décoration : Catherine Scotto
Photo Magazine : Agnès Grégoire
La Croix : Cécile Guilbert