Isabelle Arthuis

Les naufrageurs, 2010
digital video and 16 mn transfered into digital, Black and White, 16/9
synchronized triptych video installation, 18'38''loop
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Born in 1969 in Le Mans (FR), Isabelle Arthuis splits her time between France and Belgium. For ten years she has benefited from numerous exhibition s abroad: in Belgium (Brussels, Liege), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Switzerland (Fribourg), Austria (Vienna, Salzburg), Luxembourg, Germany (Frankfurt), Greece, Monte Negro, and Poland. In addition to this important international activity, Isabelle Arthuis is nevertheless present on the French art scene in public collections (FRAC Brittany, Museum of Modern Art of Paris, Museum of Fine Arts, Brest), the FRACs and in contemporary art centers. Very attached to Brittany, where this former student of the Beaux-Arts of Rennes spends several months each year to work (notably in Brest or at Belle-Ile), Isabelle Arthuis exhibited there on many occasions: recently at the contemporary art center the Quartier in Quimper (2008) while participating simultaneously in the exhibition «Brest and the Painters” at the Museum of Beaux-Arts of Brest. In this region she has also exhibited at the FRAC Bretagne, at the National Theater of Britanny and at the Grand Cordel in Rennes, at the Beaux-Arts of Lorient, in Passerelle, in Brest, etc. Numerous art critics and curators have supported her work: Denys Zacharopoulos, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Laurence Bossé (Traversées, MAMVP, 2001), Eric Corne (Voir en peinture, le Plateau, 2003), Jean-Marc Huitorel, Judicaël Lavrador, François Aubart, Bernard Marcellis, Cécile Bourne, Bruno di Rosa, etc.

If she presents herself primarily as a photographer, Isabelle Arthuis produces photographic works in a much more extensive way. She conceives and creates silver prints that she often develops herself, not hesitating to crop, to reverse or to inverse the negatives, posters in massive formats that she frequently posts in public spaces or presents as installations, publishes artists’ books or slide shows in which she displays visual and colorful series, and directs films that she creates in a quasi-pictorial manner. The numerous subjects of her photographs and the image of the world that she brings with her camera surround and approach the world of paintings. She is not concerned by objectivity but rather by a subjectivity where she assumes her relation to the world, shared with others. Seascapes and urban landscapes, portraits of fishermen or of body movement, photographs of paintings, frescoes or paused audiovisual images: it is «the relationship to the world, rather than the world itself, the in-between where lies the regard as a ‘manière d’être’ that can be sensed in Isabelle Arthuis’ process from initial shot to its publication or exhibition (Jean-Marc
Huitorel, 2000).»