Tessa Perutz’s artworks function as psychological landscapes, touring the fields and valleys of the Earth as well as the inner mind. Her works are a testimony to spontaneous exploration: sprinkled with anecdotes, hasty jottings and existential ponderings, Perutz’ oeuvre is shaped by processes of conceptualization and intuition, organically intertwining and informing one another. Paintings echo each other, mirroring seriality through repeated motifs and evocative use of colour. Encapsulating a mixed materiality, botanicals such as sand and lavender are incorporated for their healing and transformative properties.
The solo exhibition at Casino Luxembourg is the American artist’s first institutional show comprising paintings on canvas and paper mostly depicting European landscapes she studied and visited while living abroad. The exhibition combines existing works with new paintings including a large format study of Bordighera, a town on the Italian Riviera close to the French border. The artist aspired to follow in the steps of French Impressionist Claude Monet, entranced in her turn, by the same Mediterranean light and characteristic fauna and flora as the avant-garde had been, more than a century before.
As well as framed landscapes, a mural fresco represents the Marseille skyline as seen from one of the city’s renowned rooftops of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. By precisely summoning such locations, Perutz intends to revisit views of historically male academic practices - painting and architecture - through contemporary female artistic intuition and gaze.
