Press Release

Michel François

Domestic

March 15 - May 10, 2008

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 15, 2008

MC is pleased to present Domestic, an exhibition of new work by Belgian artist Michel François, and his first solo show on the West Coast. An exercise in formal installation of sculpture, Domestic transforms the gallery space, playing with divided volumes and the tension between domesticity and institutional display.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is confronted with the gallery’s lowered lighting tracks, cutting through the height of the space and creating a theatrical ring around a single sculpture. Fonte (Melting), 2008, which is a puddle of chromed steel. It is an object that was once industrial and now precious, stuck between its solid and liquid states.

Nothing is quite what it seems. In Domestic, 2008, for example, François has created two mirrored rooms within the gallery space, each filled with identical elements: a couch carved from a block of Styrofoam on which an oversized cigarette is laid upon, a video projection is directed on a black screen which appears to have been a world map. Separating both environments, a heavy metal net hangs from the ceiling. The edges of the grid have the frail irregularity of the gold leaf that covers the structure, and worn and torn clothing hang from various parts of it.

Simultaneously articulating and dividing the space, this golden net is a formal interpretation of a border, separating identical worlds that look at each other, and where stories go unfinished. Each room tells a tale of disappearance as suggested by the maps with no location and the cigarettes – half consumed.

To coincide with Domestic, MC and Michel François have produced a limited edition of a paper notebook whose pages bare a hole made by a cigarette burn. This and other available MC limited editions can be found on our website, www.mckunst.com.

Michel François was born in 1956 in Saint-Trond, Belgium. He has exhibited widely across Europe and represented Belgium at the Venice Biennial in 2001. Recent solo exhibitions include Bortolami Gallery, New York and Thomas Dane, London. Past Solo exhibitions include Frac Haute-Normandie, Rouen; Frac Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France; CCStrombeek, Belgium; Maison de la culture d’Amiens, France; Art Pace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas; De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Space Vox, Montreal; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Center for Photography, Geneva, Switzerland and Fondatión Miró, Barcelona, Kunsthalle Bern, and Haus der Kunst, Munich. François’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions such as, “Recent Video from Belgium,“ Philadelphia Museum of Art, The São Paolo Biennal XXII, and Documenta IX. The artist currently lives and works in Brussels.

For more information, please contact Vera Neykov at vera@mckunst.com