Untitled

After having developed a body of work of found objects that she transformed into installations, the American artist Ser Serpas turned to figurative painting. Born in 1996, Serpas questions issues related to identity, sexuality, and their contemporary representation.

Painted on simple, found materials, usually wood, this series was initially made up of thirty-six paintings. The artist then reconfigured this same series onto canvas, which the works presented are drawn from.

Ser Serpas's works bring to life the subjective experience of the artist observing bodies—her own and those of others. In the manner of the early twentieth-century painters who sought, through schematization, to rid themselves of both reality and the idealist tradition, she proposes a fragmentary figuration: the rapid and schematic style and the tight cropping reminiscent of cell phone photography, create fragmented portraits, in a state of indecision. These figures in movement are as many bodies in a phase of sexual reattribution. The absence of a face also makes it possible to make universal the intimate and subjective experience of the relationship with one's own body, as well as the way one looks at those of others.

This framing of the experience responds to the framing of the painting itself in Serpas's work, here removed from the frame and pinned directly to the wall.

This selection of works by Ser Serpas is presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition "Ouverture" at the Bourse de Commerce in 2021.