Our work is a journey without maps in the course of which we slowly discover the places and signs of our cultural memory. In the course of which we accumulate traces, notes, documents, photographs, books and sheets of paper, like tenacious archaeologists. This book covers the thirty year career of the well known French couple Anne and Patrick Poirier, who have always worked around the concept of memory being the only road towards defeating the generalised amnesia that is a feature of our age. With a grouping of works on the theme of ruin – reliefs, fragments, sculptures and environmental installations of landscapes of classical antiquity – the Poiriers have represented the fragility of time, showing that only the image of memory, accompanied by the sense of an identity not lost, can give meaning and concreteness to the life of man. The book ranges from tracings on paper, which seem like fragments taken out of history, to oversized depictions of the human brain. If in the great enamelled glass ovals of the Factory of Memory the artists have succeeded in outlining an ideal map of links between the different hemispheres of the human soul, in Disappear in Silence, an installation inspired by baroque trompe l’oeil frescoes, the very image of man is dissolved amid mirrors and heavy drapes. After attending the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Anne and Patrick Poiriers won the Prix de Rome in 1967 and moved to the Villa Medici the following year, remaining in Rome until 1971. Since then they have always worked together, on the theme of memory, with a language that has passed through architecture, painting, sculpture and land art. Their works have been shown at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (1977), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1978), at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1978), at the MOMA (1978), at P.S.1 (1980) and at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna (1993).
Community Notes