In collaboration with NYU’s 80WSE Gallery
An exhibition of work by five Doctoral students from L’UFR d’Arts Plastiques, Paris | Sorbonne
July 10 – July 26, 2012
Opening Reception: Tuesday, July 10, 6 – 8PM

White Box in collaboration with NYU’s 80WSE Gallery is excited to announce Commencement, an exhibition of work by five Doctoral students from L’UFR d’Arts Plastiques, Paris | Sorbonne. These students have been selected for a one-year exchange with NYU Steinhardt’s Art Department, initiated and supported by the Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation. The project allows young artists to experience global culture first-hand and to create new cultural and artistic initiatives between New York and Paris.

Aurélie Arqué is an artist born in the south of France in 1985. After attending l’École Supérieure d’Art in Toulon, she moved to Paris where she studied fine art at la Sorbonne. Her work focuses on the power of the image and its impact and place in contemporary society. Aurélie uses art as a means of challenging preconceived ideas and finds alternative representations in everyday imagery. The topics of her work extend from political imagery to pornography. Her recent work on soldiers depicts a violent beauty and a fatal symmetry and shows that when the conflict becomes a spectacle, the limits between destruction and entertainment become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Etienne Laurent, having obtained a National Diploma in Fine Arts at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Caen in 2002, Etienne Laurent subsequently exhibited in London, Paris and Timisoara in Romania. He is currently enrolled as a PhD student in Art at the Paris Sorbonne University and is at present participating in an exchange program with NYU Steinhardt.

Influenced by the works of Barry McGee, Jim Shaw and Allan McCollum, Etienne Laurent has a unique approach: he is only using traditional works of art such as paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures to create his installations.

His “Proliferative Installations” are so called because of this mix, and because of the process of installing/storing the artworks exposed. Each artwork installed acquires a specific kind of identity through its creation (or appropriation), selection, hanging, and the documentation of its “life”. Etienne Laurent is consequently writing a doctoral dissertation about the specific kind of existence of his art pieces.

Antoine Lefebvre calls himself an artist-publisher, because everything he does is printed, and most of the time in large quantities. His works explores every kind of printed matter, from lithograph to zines, with a constant concern for language, and the way it operates. He founded in 2009 his own publication structure for artists books called La Bibliothèque Fantastique. Lefebvre graduated from the Sorbonne in Fine Arts, where he is now pursuing a Phd in Fine Arts. Due to an exchange program with the NYU MFA program, he is currently living and working in New York.

Elodie Lombarde is a french artist born in 1983. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Paris where she is pursuing her Phd at the Sorbonne. Having received a scholarship from La Fondation de France, she currently attends New York University’s Steinhardt School for Graduate Studies in Fine Arts.

Her work revolves around commonplace materials of everyday life in which she finds formal and narrative qualities. Materials and pictures that have no value for the consumer society and mass media but are symbolic in their use or content.
With the accumulation of this, she looks for an abstraction of the subject and formal simplicity. These raw materials become the form of her artistic research based on what they are, and not what they are supposed to be.
 She uses them to make an art that is minimum and fragile, and to suggest the political dimension of the little things of everyday life.

Lucie Rocher is a French photographer born in 1988. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Paris. She is pursuing her PhD at the Sorbonne and currently attends New York University Steinhardt for graduate study in fine arts. Her mise en scène photography focuses on the relationship between body and space, or, Du neutre des corps et des décors (Neuter Bodies and Decors). Working with commonplace spaces such as appartments, bathrooms and closets, her photographs capture the interaction of a body and an architecture all while proposing contradictions of intimacy and anonymity; the neuter and the sexual; the clinical and the familiar. Her work has been exhibited in Paris, Manhattan and the Bronx.

For more info about the program and artists, visit here

For inquiries, email info@whiteboxny.org or call 212-714-2347.