Mathilde Denize: Reverse for a Better Move

The Perrotin gallery hosts French feminist painter Mathilde Denize for her first solo exhibition in New York, concluding her participation in an artist residency at Villa Medici in Rome. For this show, Denize proposes a series of paintings-as-garments that explore self-presentation, the body, and gender performance. Denize’s work is born from a desire to make meaning emerge from a fragmented present. A collector of discarded objects, she often cuts up her older paintings and then weaves them into new forms with found materials. Thus, new artworks are born from remnants of the past, a metaphor for the complicated existence of human beings. Inspired by great experimental artists, like Carolee Scheemann, she utilizes the body as much as the painting. Her garments, which often resemble a sexualized female form, act as both armor and camouflage.