Jean-Charles de Quillacq

Born in 1979, Jean-Charles de Quillacq studied at ENSBA Lyon and at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. He lives in Sussac, Limousin and Zürich, Switzerland.Jean-Charles de Quillacq develops sets of sculptures that are both conceptual and fetishistic. He often shows them by inviting other people to take charge of exhibiting them, accepting a certain loss of control over the potential deviations that these collaborations could cause.Since 2011, when he was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Jean-Charles de Quillacq has been working with epoxy resin, which he tirelessly kneads like a “psychological material”. He mixes it with other substances like nicotine, urine or Viagra, or blows blue ink from ballpoint pens into it. This demanding mouth-work underscores the performative aspect and the orality in a practice that has given rise to several performances: Le Remplaçantand L’Imitation par les larmes at Les Ateliers de Rennes (2018), Faire Elle at Triangle France (cur. Lotte Arndt and Marie de Gaulejac, 2018), and Fraternité Passivité Bienvenue at the Palais de Tokyo (cur. Jean-Christophe Arcos and Vittoria Matarrese, 2016).Quillacq has also participated in several group exhibitions, including “Humainnonhumain” at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard (cur. Anne Bonnin, 2014), “L’Après-midi” at Villa Arson, which dedicated a short monograph to his work (Mes mains dans tes chaussures, 2015), “À Cris Ouverts”, the Rennes Biennial (cur. Etienne Bernard and Céline Kopp, 2018) and “Future, ancient, fugitive”at the Palais de Tokyo (cur. Franck Balland, Daria de Beauvais, Adélaïde Blanc and Claire Moulène, 2019). His work has also beenshown in solo exhibitions, including“Ma sis t’aime reproductive”,atart3(Valence, 2021),“Ma système reproductive” at Bétonsalon (cur. Mélanie Bouteloup and Lucas Morin, 2019), “My Tongue Does This to Me”, with Hedwig Houben at La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec (cur. Emilie Renard, 2018), “Getting a Younger Sister, Thinking to Myself” at the Swiss Art Awards, where he was one of the winners (Basel, 2017), “Je t’embrasse tous”and “Autofonction”both atMarcelle Alix gallery (Paris, 2016and 2020), and “Four Works in a Rectangle”, Rote Fabrik (Zurich, 2012).He is currently a resident at Villa Medici in Rome. ...

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. ...