AUREL SCHMIDT AND PIERRE MOLINIER
2014-05-05Both Molinier’s and Schmidt’s work reflect their exquisite craftsmanship, as well as practices that are thoroughly intertwined with their own lives. Precious and personal, the work is exacting, highly detailed and teeming with overt intimacy. Decorative religious and sexual symbols abound throughout the work speaking to memory, fantasy and desire. Fascinating and repulsive, grotesque and refined, the work is meant to both entice and reveal our inner desires.
Anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Pierre Molinier (1900-1976, Agen, France) studied as a painter, turning to fetishtic eroticism in 1950. Believing the androgynous hermaphrodite to be the ideal, balanced sex, Molinier employed his own body, along with a wide range of specially made props: prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, elaborate godemichés (the French word for dildos), black net stockings, lingerie, masks and the occasional trusted friend in performative acts of transformation. Intended to shock, the resulting photomontages depict intimate portraits of spiritual and erotic rapture that Molinier acted out in the theater of his Bordeaux boudoir. André Breton integrated Molinier into the Surrealist group with an exhibition of his paintings in Paris in 1956. That same year, Molinier began contributing to the magazine Le surrélisme, même and started taking his erotic photographs.
Opposite – Aurel Schmidt, Untitled (Lips), 2014
Exhibition runs through to June 21st, 2014
M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California
90069
