Mrzyk & Moriceau and Félicien Rops

Large-Scale Installation Incorporates Symbolist Prints from Permanent Collection

As part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) Contemporary Projects series, French artists Petra Mrzyk (b.1973) and Jean-François Moriceau (b. 1974) have created a large-scale, site-specific wall drawing installation inspired by, and incorporating, twenty-five prints from nineteenth-century Belgian Symbolist artist Félicien Rops (1833–1898) from the museum’s permanent collection. Contemporary Projects 10: Mrzyk & Moriceau and Félicien Rops—You Only Live 25 Times, (March 23–June 4, 2006) is the first Los Angeles exhibition by these French artists and a one time only, exclusive installation you won’t want to miss!

For their ephemeral wall drawing, Mrzyk and Moriceau integrate a selection of Rops prints taken from the museum’s extensive collection of nine hundred works by the artist, which was generously given by Michael G. Wilson in 1983, and is one of the largest in the United States.

Referencing popular imagery and literary, philosophical, and political sources, Mrzyk and Moriceau ironically combine dark humor and absurd elements with a graphic, elegant style. Spidery imagery bordering on the Gothic creates an aura of sinister, anxious thoughts, alongside a graphic repertoire of body parts, deformations, and strange characters enveloped and destroyed by carnivorous plants or swallowed by mechanical devices.

Rops too used irony in his well-known drawings, which often expressed strong opinions about religion, politics, and culture by using both erotic and satanic imagery. In his renderings, everyday objects, such as chairs, were fitted with eyes, suggesting an omniscient power to spy on human beings. Sexual organs were disembodied, floating in the air and morphing into threatening monsters.

You Only Live 25 Times, organized by LACMA Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellow Noëllie Roussel, incorporates Mrzyk and Moriceau’s playful yet ironic style with Rops’ sense of humor. Influenced by Rops, Mrzyk and Moriceau integrate his stylistic elements and imagery with their own artistic language. Together, the work of these three artists forms an exhibition steeped in the long tradition of drawing, while remaining distinctly contemporary and provocative. Michael G. Wilson, the donor of the Rops collection to LACMA, is a producer of James Bond films, and Mrzyk and Moriceau often base the titles of their works on Bond movies, as they do here.

LACMA’s Contemporary Projects Series You Only Live 25 Times is the tenth installment in LACMA’s Contemporary Projects series, which provides the opportunity for the museum to organize smaller-scale shows of cutting-edge work in all media by artists from Los Angeles and around the world. This ongoing series provides viewers the opportunity to consider significant trends in contemporary culture. Stan Douglas, Keith Edmier, Farrah Fawcett, Gajin Fujita, Jim Hodges, Guillermo Kuitca, Gabriel Kuri, Sharon Lockhart, Los Carpinteros, Lee Mingwei, Mariko Mori, Jack Pierson, Pipilotti Rist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lincoln Tobier, Pablo Vargas-Lugo, and Rachel Whiteread are among the artists previously featured in Contemporary Projects.

About the Artists Petra Mrzyk was born in 1973 in Nuremberg, Germany; Jean-François Moriceau was born in 1974 in Saint-Nazaire, France. The pair, who both currently live in France, met while attending art school in the mid-1990s. Like many contemporary French artists, they began to blur artistic boundaries between mass culture and traditional techniques. Their work has been in group exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and PS1, New York. The artists also have produced a short animated video for the French pop band, Air, and various advertisements broadcast in Europe.

Félicien Rops was born in 1833 in Namur, Belgium and died in 1898 in Essonne, France. A master engraver, illustrator, and designer, he worked predominantly in France with such literary figures as Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire. Rops was considered the most famous European commercial artist of his time.

Pressetext

Contemporary Projects 10
Mrzyk & Moriceau and Félicien Rops: You Only Live 25 Times
Petra Mrzyk, Jean-Francois Moriceau