"LA CHAIR DU MONDE" - Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, 62 Rue des Archives, Paris

From April 23 to November 3 2024, le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature presents the first major exhibition in France by the artist Tamara Kostianovsky.

Upcycling as an expression of the world.

With subtlety and strength, her artistic work explores complex themes such as memory, violence, colonization, the evanescence of life, and the connections between the human body and nature. Her sculptural work is expressed in installations that use nontraditional materials, including used clothing and discarded textiles, to explore ideas related to the fragility of existence and the relationship between flesh and our environment. She creates true trompe-l'oeil of striking beauty, yet deceptive, where the work oscillates between fascination and repulsion.

By exploring deep and universal themes through an innovative use of ordinary materials, Tamara Kostianovsky has earned a unique place in the world of contemporary art, captivating viewers with her works charged with meaning and emotion. 

For her first solo exhibition in a French museum, nearly thirty works have been carefully selected and integrated into the exhibition hall and the permanent collection, highlighting the full diversity of her work.

Among tree stumps, exotic birds, and textile carcasses...

The exhibition hall is a blank canvas offered to the artist. It invites the visitor on a forest walk, where the trees and stumps that have taken root are made of recycled clothes, metamorphosed. For this exceptional installation, Tamara Kostianovsky has created a monumental new body of work.

In the drawing room, between the works of Chardin and Desportes, fabric birds perch on the walls of plum velvet brocade. In the vestibule, the visitor discovers imposing textile carcasses, unsettling and disturbing from the tensions they produce, acting between beauty and violence, refinement and ferocity. The artist explains: "The series represents carcasses transforming into vegetation, becoming capsules that host exotic birds and plants. I conceive these works in terms of metamorphosis. The idea is to transform the image of the carcass, which, from a place of carnage becomes a matrix where life takes root - like a utopian environment."

A little further on, naturally, the bird room offers its walls to vegetized decorative panels enriched with birds that implicitly address colonization. Research on French wallpapers from the Age of Enlightenment, imbued with the colonial imaginary of an exotic and fantasized elsewhere, are the sources of this series with an almost fairy-like vegetation and birds adorned - or even saturated - with thousands of colors. 

Finally, in the forest room, once again, other panels - including triptychs - allow visitors to approach more closely and to glance over all the meticulousness and poetry of her work. 

After exhibitions by Eva Jospin, Carolein Smit, Vincent Fournier, or Sean Landers exploring mediums as different as cardboard, ceramics, photography, or painting, with Tamara Kostianovsky, the Museum of Hunting and Nature continues its ambition to introduce different figures of contemporary art. Always faithful to the vision of the museum's founders, François and Jacqueline Sommer, this commitment materializes in highlighting a creative and peaceful dialogue between Man and the Living. 

Biography 

Tamara Kostianovsky was born in 1974 in Argentina. She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the National School of Fine Arts "Prilidiano Pueyrredón" in Buenos Aires (1998) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2003). Of Argentinian-American nationality, the artist currently lives and works in New York City, United States