Mimosa Echard

Mimosa Echard is a French visual artist who lives and works in Paris.

Biography Echard was born in 1986 in Alès, France. She grew up with her sisters in a hippie community in the Cévennes. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, from which she graduated in 2010. Since 2021, she has been the head of a painting workshop at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Echard is the winner of the 2022 edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize. she creates fictional worlds with psychedelic traits through the accumulation and assemblage of objects, images as well as botanical references from the Cévennes (her native region), a region with a long history of counter-cultural and community experiments initiated in the 1970s.

Collaboration is important in reading her work: ”Collaborations are always a way of creating collective events and experiences outside of the validation system of art and institutions”. One example is the "open-source experimental exploration game" proposed by Echard as part of her exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in 2022, accessible only online. Designed in collaboration with a software developer, musicians and actors, the “scenario imagines an engaging and humorous approach to interspecies relations”.

Her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including Sporal, at Palais de Tokyo in 2022, or Sluggy Me at the Collection Lambert, in Avignon in 2021,

Solo exhibitions (selection)

2010: Pour changer de forme, diploma, École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Paris 2012: Booster, Modules Pierre-Bergé – Yves-Saint-Laurent Foundation, curated by Daria de Beauvais, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2012: Oiseau / hasard, Bernard-Anthonioz Art House, Nogent-sur-Marne 2014: Destroy the Image and You Will Break the Enemy, Project room, Chez Valentin Gallery, Paris 2015: Asterico Mariposa, Fire Place, Barcelona 2015: Dead is the New Life, Le Plateau (center of contemporary art) / Frac, Île-de-France 2015: Mithril, with Jonathan Martin, Circonstance Gallery, Nice 2015: Une robe profonde d'empathie, with Jean-Marie Perdrix, Samy Abraham Gallery, Paris 2016: iDeath, Samy Abraham Gallery, Paris 2017: Friends, Samy Abraham Gallery, Paris 2017: Pulsion Potion, Cell Project Space Gallery, London 2018: Mauve Dose, Maternity Ward of the Geneva HUG, Geneva 2019: Pulpe, with Shanta Rao, curated by Raphaël Brunet, Ecole municipale des beaux-arts, Édouard-Manet Gallery, Gennevilliers 2019: Luca, with Michel Blazy, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund 2019: Cracher une image de toi/ Spitting an image of you, with Ryan Foerster and Hannah Buonaguro, VNH Gallery, Paris 2020 Un bout de toi, Salomon, Martina Simeti, Milan, Italy 2021 Numbs, Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris, France 2021 Sluggy Me, Lambert Collection, Avignon, France 2022 Sporal, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France

Awards and selections 2015 Finalist, Le Meurice Prize for Contemporary Art, Paris, France 2018 Finalist, BFSP Sculpture Prize, Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan, Italy 2021 Acquisition of the Marval Collection Fund, Italy 2021 Ettore and Ines Fico Prize, Turin, Italy 2022: Marcel Duchamp Prize, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris 2014: Villa Arson, Nice 2014/15: Cité internationale des arts, Paris 2019: Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto

Collections Her works are part of public and private collections including: the Pompidou Center, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Paris Museum of Modern Art, the National Centre of Plastic Arts in Paris, the Corporate Foundation of the Lafayette Galleries in France, the Ettore Fico Museum in Turin, Italy; and the Samdani Art Foundation, in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Notes and references