Aurore Le Duc - Nos Cœurs Sur Les Cimaises

« With Les Supporters de Galeries (Gallery Supporters), a project started in 2015, I am interested in what seems to be an obvious analogy between football and contemporary art.

Indeed, professional football generates sums of money that can be counted in millions of euros, just like the art market. The world of contemporary art is becoming more and more mediatized and celebrified, just like football.

The large sums of money at stake and the growing popularity of artists and gallery owners are leading to a fierce confrontation between the different players of this field. Competition between artists, between gallery owners, between collectors: contemporary art has become a sport.

As in football, there are negotiations between galleries (clubs) for artists (players), star gallery owners (trainers), collectors (shareholders, owners) who are fighting a relentless economic war. Fairs and auction houses are the grounds where they meet. Symbolic and hidden violence replaces that of the stands and frontal confrontation on the playing field.

Based on this analogy, I invented fictitious groups of supporters of prestigious galleries. I write hymns and slogans to their glory, create logos, derivative products that I use to stage unauthorized performances. I loudly encourage their artists in large institutions when they are in the spotlight, unfurl banners, enthusiastically shake my scarf in front of their stands during fairs. It is the whole universe of Ultras that I revisit through this prism.

For this exhibition, Nos cœurs sur les cimaises (Our hearts on the picture rails), I was focused on my particular status as an "emerging artist" and on that of the GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, a young structure that celebrates its two years of existence this year. I created for the occasion the "gear" to support this "club", the ideal kit to support it fervently.

The young gallery is here seen as a team of "rising stars", selecting promising artists. Will they be the future champions of the art world, or will they fall back into anonymity? Will their prices skyrocket or will they fail before the gates of glory? »

Aurore Le Duc

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Aurore Le Duc (1988, Cergy-Pontoise) lives and works in Montreuil. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2012, and is since then pursuing work exploring the relationships between popular and "elitist" culture. Interested as much in pop culture, the history of art and ideas as in architecture, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice combining performance, sculpture, painting, photography, needlework and drawing.

She presents her first solo exhibition, Les Supporters : Season 1 in 2016 at The Window Gallery (Paris), followed in 2017 by Super Workaholic Girl in Onoma in Onoma (Fiskars, Finland). More recently, she participated, as a resident artist, in the group exhibition Par amour du jeu 1998-2018, at the Magasins Généraux (Pantin) in June 2018, and she performed in the group exhibition 100 % at La Villette, as well as at the CAC La Traverse (Alfortville), at the Espace des Femmes Antoinette Fouque (Paris), and at GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO (Paris).