Artists

Mai-Thu Perret

Press release

The sculptures, paintings, ceramic works, light installations, performances, and texts of Mai-Thu Perret exist at the intersection of contemporary culture, art historical critique, and visceral materiality. She explores—and generates—feminist narratives and counter-narratives that cast the role of the art object in a new light, introducing utilitarian, symbolic, and even mystical possibilities in contexts often limited to formalist readings. In her encompassing vision, for instance, the development of modernism appears not only as a story of increasing abstraction, but also as the outgrowth of biological and neurological patterns that have informed human expression across the globe for thousands of years. Perret's work demonstrates how bodies are always implicit subjects of artistic discourse, and how impulses toward utopian transcendence—aesthetic, political, or otherwise—can invariably be traced back to the physicality of desire. Born in 1976 in Geneva in Switzerland, Perret lives and works in New York and Geneva.