Untitled - Original Mixed Media on Paper by Anne and Patrick Poirier - 1979 1979

Untitled is a wonderful mixed-media artwork on paper (collage) realized in 1979 by Anne and Patrick Poirier. Hand-signed and dated in brown ink on the lower margin at the center. Five dried leaves were placed on a sheet of cream-colored cardboard, of which three are hidden and two are shown. Below each leaf there are handwritten notes in brown ink. This sort of still life of natural elements means to raise meditation on time, a usual theme in the Poirier's oeuvre, and takes on unprecedented levels of poetry. Anne Poirier was born in Houllevigue, Marseille, in 1942; Patrick Poirier was born in Nantes in 1942. The two French brothers and artists, through their contemporary artworks and installations, deal with issues related to architecture, archeology, and mythology, reflecting on the themes of time, memory, and space. Both studied at the École Superieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and then won the Prix de Rome, which allowed them to stay for three years in the Italian capital at the French Academy of Villa Medici. Their artistic research, heterogeneous in techniques and materials, from drawing to photography, from the cast to the collection of objects, from sculpture to video, aims at pondering on the theme of time and on its effects on memory. The two artists have found fragments of ruins at some archaeological sites, both real and imaginary, and reproduced them with Japanese paper casts, photographs, archival research, giving life to a sort of parallel archeology. These works refer to the archaeological sites of Villa Medici (1971), Ostia Antica (1972), the Domus Aurea (1975-77), as well as to the fantastic cities inspired by Borges or mythological stories. They also created monumental works in marble and bronze, shattered statues or architectural elements (The death of Efialte, 1982; Giove e Encelado, 1982-83, Antibes, Musée Picasso), large photographs (still lifes of objects, words engraved on petals), complex installations like The shadow of Gradiva. A last excavation campaign through the collections of the Getty Center (Los Angeles, 1999-2000) further underlined the theme of fragility, of the ephemeral, and of violence. Recent works include Danger zone (2001); L'âme du voyageur endormi (2004); The memory factory (2006); The labyrinth of memory (2007), a mirror installation designed for the Filosofia festival and the atrium at the Palazzo dei Musei in Modena, Italy.