Mathilde Rosier

Mathilde Rosier was born in Paris in 1973. She lives and works between Burgundy, France and Basel, Switzerland.

The way Mathilde Rosier works finds its starting point in the decision to retire at the heart of a rural and agricultural environment, which has been the central subject of her work for the last 20 years. In the first phase of this research, the artist turned to the history of psychology and to the hypothesis that the only authentic link to nature lies in the unconscious, a relic of our primitive state which contrasts with the civilised and conscious self.

For a few years now, these representations of domesticated nature have continued in a new series, where hybrid bodies bud with vegetal limbs, these images evoke simultaneously the mental experience of dissolution in living things which the artist submits to, the intensity of her link with her environment, and that which is induced by industrial agricultural methods; the immediate kinship between plant and human, and the intensive exploitation of one by the other. If her earlier works were ways of communing with the world, these works are about becoming one with it.

Whether treated through paintings, drawings, assemblages, films, costumes, or performances, this theme continues to express itself, in a way which could recall symbolist art, the decorative art of the theatre or ballet, or even the ornaments common in certain Indigenous works.

Excerpt from Thierry Leviez’s text for the Aware Prize.