They Hover over Me
Lauren Coullard

11.01—26.01.2025
Curated by Arthur Fouray

DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/they-hover-over-me-exposition-personnelle-de-lauren-coullard/

Booklet
Booklet-Lauren-Coullard-They-Hover-over-Me-DOC-2025.pdf

Photographs: Arthur Fouray
Graphic design: Tom Cazin

They Hover over Me, whose title is borrowed from the poem ‘Hare Drummer’ in Spoon River Anthology (Edgar Lee Masters, 1915), attests to the maturity of Lauren Coullard’s latest developments and transformations. The paintings presented here intermix pop imaginaries from various parts of the world – from manga to science fiction – with a critical rereading of Western classical art, ranging from medieval works to early Flemish painting.

Organized at DOC, the exhibition marks a symbolic return for the artist, who was one of the first to join this association founded in Paris ten years ago to provide production spaces for artists. For Lauren as for me, this reunion with DOC is just as moving. I joined the team in charge of exhibitions there during FIAC 2016, starting with a collective project we had initially conceived with Lauren. She then invited me to share her studio until 2019. I organized her first solo show, BREAK (FEAST), 2017, at Silicon Malley, the artist-run space I co-founded in Switzerland in 2015. For her new solo project at DOC, we devised a layout that echoes the dynamic of the studio itself, with its infinite waltz of paintings, portraits, scales, colors, and forms. The pictorial surfaces overlap, intersect, pile up, intertwine, interlock, hide behind one another, veil one another, stack up, and metamorphose. The hanging offers two ways of experiencing the works: one at a traditional eye level, at the top of the two staircases, and the other inside the main room, beneath the steel picture rails where the pieces hover above our heads. Mounted three meters high, the paintings play with the codes of classic Western decorative art by reversing the hierarchy of the gaze.

The Wreck Glutton series brings together a group of recent paintings from 2024 and 2025. These pieces appear in the forthcoming book collages (2025), created in collaboration with Lillian Davies, a Franco-American art historian, curator, and author. Their intimate interviews trace the genesis of these blends of genres, eras, and obsessions, which then become transfigured by color once projected onto canvas. These A6-format cutouts serve as a continuous source of back-and-forth within the artist’s practice, shifting, altering, tearing, dissecting all manner of fractured surfaces, faces, clothing, and adornments, in order to photocopy, re-photocopy, twist, erode, double, reuse, assemble, and mutate them, ultimately reaching a kind of vibration, a tremor.

Over time, one could consider that the two major facets of Coullard’s practice – collages and paintings – have come to converge. The canvases adhere more closely to the structure of the images, while the collages, for their part, though retaining their existing formula (assemblages/Xerox on colored backgrounds), become more colorful and grow in size, asserting themselves as an autonomous embodiment of the work. For her paintings, she starts with an acrylic base, then adds layers of oil, felt pen, pencil, charcoal, glitter pen, and more. Despite the prevalence of subject matter in Coullard’s work, I believe that her most sensitive pursuit lies in her quest for emotion through color, layers, pleats, patchworks of materials, and chromatic arrangements. In her words, ‘Painting is the moment of fire,’ echoing a quotation by Simone Fattal about Etel Adnan’s works, which, ‘radiate energy and impart energy. They become talismans’ (Simone Fattal, Etel Adnan, La Peinture comme énergie pure, 2016). Whether through her approach to motifs or her technique, Coullard dismantles boundaries and structures, tears, recomposes, rereads, and inverts her icons into free associations.

The choice of title nods to the collection of portraits in the Wreck Glutton series. Edgar Lee Masters’ anthology, among the foundational texts of early twentieth-century American literature, restores, via fictional epitaph-poems, the silenced voices of an imaginary village. Through its works and their presentation, They Hover over Me creates a hushed confrontation with identities, geographies, strangeness, and collective memories.

Arthur Fouray

Lauren Coullard

https://www.laurencoullard.com

After studying architecture, Lauren Coullard graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy and from Chelsea College of Art in London.

She is the cofounder of DOC, a residency and exhibition space. Represented by the MOUNTAINS gallery (Berlin), she has been teaching at ESBA MOCO since January 2024, working with first- and second-year students.

Invited in 2023 to lead a workshop at CREDAC (Ivry-sur-Seine) and in 2024 by the Van Gogh Foundation (Arles), she has also taken part in several residencies, notably at Moly Sabata, the Robert Laurent-Vibert Foundation (Académie des Beaux-Arts with the Fondation de France), and Les Capucins in Embrun.

Her work has been exhibited at MOUNTAINS (Berlin), A.ROMY and Silicon Malley (Switzerland), the BASS Museum (Miami), as well as at Bagnoler_, Idealfrühstück, Palomar Project, galerie sans-titre, galerie Exo Exo, DOC!, and at the Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois gallery (Paris). She has also presented her work at the Center For Recent Drawing and the ICA (London), at the Salon de Montrouge, the Domaine Pommery, the Zoo Galerie, La Tôlerie (France), and the Peter Bergman Gallery (Stockholm).

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