Exhibition Making DOC! Lauren Coullard They Hover over Me

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 the recent developments and transformations in Lauren Coullard’s practice. The paintings shown here mix pop imagery from different parts of the world – from manga to science fiction – with a critical rereading of Western classical art, from medieval works to early Flemish painting.


Organised at DOC, the exhibition marks a symbolic return for the artist, 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 conceived with Lauren. She then invited me to share her studio until 2019. I organised her first solo show, BREAK (FEAST), 2017, at Silicon Malley, the artist-run space I co-founded in Switzerland in 2015. For her solo project at DOC, we devised a layout that follows the energy of the studio itself, with its endless waltz of paintings, portraits, scales, colours 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 readings: one at the usual eye level, at the top of the two staircases; the other inside the room, beneath the steel picture rails, where the works hover above our heads. Hung three metres high, the paintings play with the codes of classical Western decoration by reversing the hierarchy of the gaze.


The Wreck Glutton series brings together a group of recent paintings made in 2024 and 2025. They derive from pieces included in the book collages (2025), made 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 are then transfigured by colour once projected onto canvas. These A6 cut-outs are a constant source of back-and-forth in the artist’s practice, shifting, altering, tearing and dissecting all manner of fractured surfaces, faces, clothes and adornments, to photocopy and re-photocopy them, twist, wear down, double, reuse, assemble and mutate them, until they reach a kind of vibration, a tremor.



One could consider that the two major facets of Coullard’s practice – collages and paintings – are converging more and more over time. The canvases follow the structure of the images more closely, while the collages, though keeping their formula (assemblages/Xerox on coloured backgrounds), take on more colour and grow in size, becoming an autonomous embodiment of the work. For her paintings, she starts with an acrylic base, then adds oil, felt pen, pencil, charcoal and glitter pen, among other things. Despite the prevalence of subject matter in Coullard’s work, I believe her most sensitive pursuit lies in her quest for emotion through colour, layers, pleats, patchworks of materials and chromatic arrangements. In her words, ‘Painting is the moment of fire’, an echo of what Simone Fattal wrote of Etel Adnan’s paintings, 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. The anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, one of the founding texts of American literature at the turn of the twentieth century, restores, through 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 co-founder 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 Centre 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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