Olivier Foulon, The Soliloquy of the Broom

Olivier Foulon, The Soliloquy of the Broom, 2008, Installationsansicht
Foto: Simon Vogel

The title of his exhibition, The Soliloquy of the Broom/Selbstgespräch eines Besens by the artist Olivier Foulon (*Brussels, 1976), floats between make-up, masquerade and painting. It focuses on Gustave Courbet’s painting Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl painted by the French artist in 1865 in Trouville. It shows a lady named Jo, mistress and model of the artist James Whistler, looking at herself and her hair in a mirror. Due to a great demand Gustave Courbet painted not only one painting but copied it several times. The four versions belong nowadays to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, the National Museum of Stockholm and to a private collector. Olivier Foulon brought the four paintings together with the help of a 16mm film and visualises not only early forms of mass production in art, but works with the concept of a model that is used as a template for a painting which itself then becomes the model for another painting.

A publication edited by Gevaert éditions is the second part of the exhibition. Olivier Foulon chose three texts from the year 2005 about the artists Michael Krebber from the Artforum International online-archive and republished them. Already on their way from the print- to the online-edition the texts were bowdlerised from the original supplementary illustrations and images, the “Image make up” and were furnished with the laconic comment “illustration omitted”. In both works Foulon questions the meaning and functionality of the individual hand of an artist. By copying his own pictures Gustave Courbet questions the concept of an artist’s hand in the same way as Michael Krebber does in his work.