21 October 2026 — 3 January 2027
Hélène Fauquet: Vivresse
On the Fondation’s top floor, Lafayette Anticipations presents Vivresse, the first institutional exhibition in France devoted to the artist Hélène Fauquet. The title is a contraction of vie (life) and ivresse (intoxication), and the exhibition invites visitors into a state in which vital force and desire become one. Fauquet’s distinctive body of work holds ornamental forms in tension with a conceptual dimension that borders on Surrealism. Her recent work explores the relationships between decoration and art, nature and artifice, history and the present – the shell has taken the measure of the work and is ready to absorb it. Her sculptures investigate shells and the questions their forms raise. They originate in a gesture of obscuring her own photographs with a three-dimensional object: the shell. Extravagantly framed, these pieces give off the shimmering allure of opaline niches, and the frames go beyond their role as display devices to become portals into a sensitive, symbolic space. Fauquet’s practice centres on the residues of photography and the movement of images. In her 2023 exhibition Phenomena at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland, she developed a phenomenological approach to perception, reflecting on the ways information is stored. Since 2023 she has also worked with the motif of the bubble, drawn from advertising, scientific photography and domestic trinkets. An unstable form, the bubble wavers between transparency and reflection; it has no fixed shape and behaves like an organism in perpetual motion – until it disappears. Her solo exhibitions include the Dansk Datahistorisk Museum, Copenhagen (2026); Édouard Montassut, Paris (2026, 2022, 2020); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2025, 2019); Ronadale, Craryville (2025); Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2024); Rodeo, London (2024); Ulrik, New York (2024); Kunsthaus Glarus (2023); Alienze, Vienna (2022); Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (2020); and Kunstverein Nürnberg (2019). Her work has recently appeared in group exhibitions at venues including the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2025), Kunstverein Ludwigshafen (2025), Frac Lorraine (2024), Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2023), Frac Alsace (2023), Bonner Kunstverein (2021), Tokyo Arts and Space (2020) and Fondazione Morra, Naples (2019).
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