MARIE LAURENCIN: WORKS FROM 1905 TO 1952

Almine Rech New York, Upper East Side is pleased to present 'Marie Laurencin, Works from 1905 to 1952', Marie Laurencin's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

January 9 - February 22, 2025

In a 1952 article for TIME, the French artist Marie Laurencin was asked about her unwavering interest in the female form. Born in 1883, she had been producing paintings, watercolors, and drawings depicting elegant young women since her twenties. Now in her late sixties, she indicated to the TIME journalist that she had no intention of changing course. “Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses?” she quipped. “Girls are so much prettier.”

As these words suggest, Laurencin was never one to shy away from the title of woman artist, embracing all things girlish with little hesitation or apology. During her long and storied career, she not only elevated female sitters—she rarely chose to represent men—but also cultivated a deliberately dainty aesthetic, favoring pastel tones, naïve storybook figuration, and airy brushstrokes. Her pretty pictures of pretty girls were more than just an ode to the power and allure of the feminine. They also functioned as visual expressions of Laurencin’s fluid sexual identity, which caused her pursue love affairs with both men and women. As a recent retrospective at the Barnes Foundation contended, the artist possessed a singular queer aesthetic that "subtly but radically challenges existing narratives of modern European art."

For its pleasing surface and transgressive subtext, Laurencin’s oeuvre was commercially and critically celebrated in her lifetime but fell into relative obscurity after her death in 1956, as the art world turned its eyes from Paris to New York and the masculine swagger of Abstract Expressionism. Thanks to recent curatorial and scholarly efforts, however, Laurencin is being returned to her rightful place in the history of modern European art. Marie Laurencin: 1905– 1952 joins in international reappraisals of the artist, showcasing over twenty works that trace the evolution of her practice from early student experimentations to mature compositions.

Laurencin also painted women in close, sensuous contact. Dancers float across stages and ballroom floors devoid of male partners. Two mermaids embrace, their tails coiling around each other’s torsos. Equestrians ride off into the distance with thighs exposed. Why, indeed, should Laurencin paint still lifes of “dead fish, onions, or beer glasses” when there was so much to explore in the rich and multilayered world of women and their desires?