Marie Jacotey

"Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t... your life will never begin."

—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves, 1992

We are excited to present Blue Fear, an exhibition of 57 new drawings by Marie Jacotey. Drawn in colour pencil on tracing and cartridge paper they capture a soft, velvet and vibrant texture—a world of baited and untold pleasures, of salutary vice. A translation of the popular French expression, ‘peur bleue’ - colloquially, ‘violent fear’ - the exhibition displays Marie Jacotey’s emblematic storytelling of love, anxiety and passion here set in the eidetic Provencal landscape. Selected from some 325 drawings made by Jacotey for her animated short-film, Filles Bleues, Peur Blanche - based on an original script by codirector Lola Halifa-Legrand - these new works contain a humble ferocity inspired by the vicissitudes of falling in love—desires and fears, exultant and unforgiving romance.

The story of Filles Bleues, Peur Blanche follows as a young couple travel the hillside roads of the south of France. Flora, our heroine, is accompanied by her partner Nils on the way to meet her parents for the first time. They drive through lysergic landscapes illuminated by sun, billboards advertise ‘À la mort amour’ — until death my love. Solemn echoes of Vallotton; of the fairytale aperture of Clouds of Sils Maria instantiated by Jacotey’s personal memories of traveling through the countryside of Marseille. The frequent cries of her work of the past few years to ‘be wild’ or let ‘wild love me’ are saturated in the landscape’s flaxen, cubist complexion; demanding of the earth as naturist Henry Thoreau did: “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilisation can endure.”

Marie Jacotey (b. 1988, Paris) lives and works in Athens. Jacotey studied at the Royal College of Art, London and École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include: You pinned me down like a butterfly on the wall, Ballon Rouge Collective, New York US (2020); It Was a Night, The Naughton Gallery, Belfast UK (2018); Wild love me, NADA 2018 with Ballon Rouge Collective and Hannah Barry Gallery, Miami US (2018); Goodbye Darkness, Ballon Rouge Collective, Paris FR (2018); Sometimes it happens, Humberto Poblete-Bustamante studio, London UK (2017); Morning Defeats, Hannah Barry Gallery, London UK (2017); Everything I used to love about us is dead, Hannah Barry Gallery, London UK (2015); and Dolly, Hannah Barry Gallery, London UK (2014).

Recent selected group exhibitions include: Home Stories, Vitra Design Museum, Germany DE (2020); Super Zoom, Paris FR (2019); Absinthe §3, Spit & Sawdust, London UK (2019); Generation Y, Platform Foundation, London UK (2019); Speak Love, fAN, Vienna AU (2019); DéjàVu, Chez Kit, Double Séjour, Paris FR (2019); The Inside Out, Drawing Room, London UK (2018); Architectural Ethnography, Japan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice IT (2018); XOXO, Soy Capitán, Berlin DE (2017); Assemble: How We Build, Architekturzentrum Wien, Austria AU (2017); Loveless, McQueen project space, London UK (2016); What’s the meaning of a goldfish, Tatjana Pieters Gallery, Belgium BE (2016); 60eme Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge, France FR (2016); and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Liverpool Biennial (2015-2016).

Alongside her own practice Marie has always sought out alliances in the worlds of architecture, fashion, poetry and other disciplines and these have come to form an additional strand of her practice - she has made drawings for Assemble for their Turner Prize-winning Granby Workshop project, she was commissioned by McQueen to make new works to complement their accessories, by The Guardian Newspaper for the front cover of their Saturday Review Supplement and by London Underground to design a new cover for their Night Tube map. Her work is in the permanent collection of the V&A Museum, London.