Anne-Marie Schneider

From her first drawings in the 1980s, focused on the overflowing potential of writing and line to her later incursions into the planes of color and in the experience of a polychromy that is situated towards the sensitive, the stroke seems to be the element that gives unity to the deliberately fragmentary imaginary of Anne-Marie Schneider.

The artist explains that, while creating, she works with consciousness and unconsciousness at the same time. In this way, the pieces selected for choreographies of the impossible are a repository of mental images that are transferred to paper. Replete with biographical resonances and allusions to social issues, the artist tries to register – or choreograph – through them the tremor that is the self, but also, as that Rimbaudian aphorism pointed out, “is another”¹.

In her works abound lonely characters or in disturbing relationships, distorted faces that are confused with their own masks, bodies that mutate and extend in the domestic space, emotional architectures where the boundary between person and structure is blurred. In the words of the critic Jean-François Chevrier, these bodies-house understand what surrounds them “as an unstable complex worked out by the violence of affections”.² The incongruous deformations make their way into a practice of their own that looks at both the grotesque and the fable; whether from the absurd, irony or criticism. Thus, the drawings and paintings of Anne-Marie Schneider sketch a self-constructed semblance: one that doesn’t stop recomposing itself through the recovery of gesture, of the remains and confusions of the speech, of the scenes that – as the referenced Virginia Woolf explained – produce a wave in the mind.³

beatriz martínez hijazo
translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

<sup>1. This phrase by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, “Je est un autre” appears in a letter from 13 May 1871, addressed to his professor Georges Izambard.
2. Jean-François Chevrier, “Stroke film color” (Trazo película color). In Anne-Marie Schneider, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Éditions L’Arachnéen, 2016.
3. Virginia Woolf, “A wave in the mind” [Letter to Vita Sackville-West], March 16, 1926. In Virginia Woolf. About writing (Sobre la escritura), ed. Federico Sabatini, Barcelona: Alba Editorial, 2015, p. 34.</sup>

Anne-Marie Schneider (Chauny, France, 1962. Lives in Paris, France) is an artist whose practice is primarily based on autobiographical references. She is best known for her drawings but also works in sculptures and films. Her works have been exhibited in spaces such as Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Documenta 10 (Kassel, Germany), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC, USA), The Morgan Library & Museum, The Drawing Center (New York, USA), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung,Taiwan), Fundació Juan Miró (Barcelona, Spain), and Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem, Israel). Her artworks are also included in the collections of French institutions such as Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Pompidou (Paris), as well as the Fonds National d’ Art Contemporain (Puteaux, France).

This participation is supported by Institut français.