Karen Knorr at Musée Carnavalet

m.osucha — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:30:21 +0000

Originally part of the same photographic movement as Martin Parr, celebrated artist Karen Knorr has transitioned from her earlier documentary style to one defined by the imaginary. With works exhibited at the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou, this London-based artist is certainly no stranger to the museum space, but it is this very space on which she now fixes her artistic gaze. Photographing arts institutions with one eye trained on the fantastic, Knorr transforms what can often be forbidding, inaccessible, and static into something playful and unexpected (not to mention slightly mischevious). And Knorr has done just this at the Musée Carnavalet, where her recent series of large-format photographs of the museum now hang. Entitled Fables – Photographie, this collection of works pictures all manner of woodland fauna roaming the luxe apartments of the Musée: pigeons flutter manically around flawless blue satin, and squirrels climb over 18th-century armoires. Knorr was inspired by the fables written by Aesop and La Fontaine, but in picturing this animal transgression of such a sanctified cultural institution she is also asking visitors to reconfigure their relationship to the space of the museum itself – to reinvent and re-imagine it.
Until 30 May
www.carnavalet.paris.fr

gogoparis.com » Musée Carnavalet

Karen Knorr at Musée Carnavalet