Liz Magor

“I started making things as a child simply as a way to make up for the deficiency of what was offered. I found most things around me to be practical, unbeautiful and meaningless. I needed things to be emotionally charged and personal, almost equivalent to me in terms of subjectivity (...) From one point of view, making art is a way of testing the positions one might take relative to the world, and the people and things found in the world. The materials, the images, the operations, the forms of address, they all come from an inventory of possibilities and I’m conscious of my choices. By now I have an enhanced ability to make things, but a diminished need for those things to speak symbolically or profoundly. Now I’m spending hours making the things I used to find unbeautiful and meaningless–a pile of towels, a stack of trays, a discarded jacket, a cardboard box–and setting them up in relationship to found things. My interest is how the studio part affects the found part. Through some mysterious operation the found things become really alive when set against the sculptural representation of something ordinary.” “A conversation with Liz Magor”, Liz Magor, ed. MAC Montréal, Migros Museum & Kunstverein im Hamburg, 2016 ...

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. ...