Laura Lamiel

“Over decades, Laura Lamiel has built an exceptional artistic identity. In fact, her work and vocabulary have never ceased to evolve, incorporating new elements, and continually blurring the boundaries between the exhibition space and the studio. In the 1990s, after abandoning the frontality of painting, she started making installations where colour and light play an essential role. Her structures, in particular her cells, are as inspired by psychoanalysis as by spiritual cosmology. They host a repertoire of sensible forms constituted by found objects, collections and certain taxonomies of materials that contrast with the immaculate surfaces of steel that she illuminates with fluorescent tubes. In the 2000s, following the cells, she developed other apparatuses—playing with the transparency and reflective nature of oneway mirrors; creating penetrable or buried spaces—while amplifying the biographical and affective charge of the adopted materials.” LL – Laura Lamiel, monograph, ed. Paraguay Press, 2019 ...

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. ...