Charlotte Moth

The work of Charlotte Moth places itself lightly in the world (...) Strong art-historical accounts of the period from 1990 onwards are hard to find, but Ina Blom’s book On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture identifies some at least of the conditions that a group of mostly European artists were responding to in this period. Blom identifies style – notably of interiors, environments and spaces that are becoming simultaneously public and private – as a new area of concern, and as a somewhat confusing twist on the earlier twentieth-century avant-garde preoccupation with the merging of art and life. Moth’s work can be seen to share characteristics with artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tobias Rehberger (among a larger group of artists discussed by Blom), in that the space of the gallery is strongly needed as the container for a complex combination of illumination, objects, furnishings and display items, histories, arrangements and images, not all of which have the same weight, physical insistence or sculptural presence. Moth does not make exhibitions that are crowded or confusing, but a complexity and a degree of uncertainty – ‘lightness’ is just one aspect of this – is folded into the objects and situations she makes (...) ‘Sculpture’ is an abiding concern for Moth, but disconcertingly, it may be produced as a side effect of other motives, as though it cannot be aimed for directly. The persistence of sculpture is consistently tested against other conditions of display and other types of spaces: living spaces, working spaces (the studio) and also spaces of representation, study and commerce. As sculpture – which is both a potential class of objects and a historical term for them that we now use uncertainly – moves through these different spaces, it seems to have become lighter. This lightness is neither a cause for celebration – as though in victory over ‘sculpture’, mass and embodiment – nor a reason for premature mourning. Lightness is perhaps more simply a condition to be felt and known. ...

We founded Marcelle Alix in 2009 in Paris and settled in a characteristic, early 20th-century boutique in Belleville. The gallery is for us a creative space, where the dialog with artists is not only meant to selling artworks, but is also based on an equal relationship to creativity. We now represents thirteen artists and two duos. Our identity has been built with the support of the artists who opened our programme (Aurélien Froment, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Charlotte Moth, Ernesto Sartori, Marie Voignier) and those we introduced to the French art scene (Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Ian Kiaer, Donna Gottschalk). During these years, we have supported broad artistic careers (Laura Lamiel, Liz Magor and Mira Schor whose work we represent exclusively in Europe) and accompanied the development of new perspectives in sculpture (Gyan Panchal, Jean-Charles de Quillacq) in video (Lola Gonzàlez), and in drawing (Armineh Negahdari). Our gallery has been a pioneer in defining a space for queer art in France : in addition to showing her work within the artist duo Boudry/Lorenz since 2011, we have directed the translation into French of Renate Lorenz's 2012 seminal book, « Queer Art » in 2018. Since 2019, we have exhibited photographs by Donna Gottschalk documenting the lives of women living with women who were involved in the lesbian movement in the United States in the 1970s. In 2023 we organised an exhibition for the Utopi.e award—first award in France for Lgbtqi+ art—for which we have invited Paris galleries Air de Paris and Sultana as fellow participants. We insist on the central role of a gallery in the ecosystem of art as a place to make idiosyncratic positions visible and weave a critical narrative around the most contemporary visual forms. ...