24 heures de la vie d'une femme ordinaire

With 24 hours in the life of an ordinary woman, Michel Journiac takes us into the daily life of a middle-class Western woman: gestures, postures, activities embody the archetype of the housewife, the wife, and the lover. The work was inspired by a survey published in the magazine Marie Claire, which sought to identify the key moments of a woman's day and to reveal her imaginary world.

With this series, Journiac—an icon of 1970s art and of camp aesthetic radicalism—makes innovative use of photography through two sets of images, “Realités” (twelve images) and “Phantasms” (twelve images). In the first group, Journiac composes the scenes as if in a photostory without any dialogue, a pantomime in which the artist himself—in drag—embodies each of these figures in context. In the second group, on a white background inspired by the aesthetics of fashion magazines, he portrays each of the imagined female fantasies or archetypal situations through stereotypical and satirical postures.

A major representative of body art in France, Michel Journiac places the social context of the body at the heart of his work. Here, the female condition becomes the focus of his scathing and critical analysis of the representations that construct gendered identities.

This ensemble is presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection in the "Ouverture" exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in 2021.