The Sleepless Hands

The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès presents: The Sleepless Hands, a group exhibition of works by artists who have taken part in its residencies programme in Hermès workshops over the past three years.

With: Bianca Argimon (b. 1988, Belgium), Jennifer Avery (b. 1983, United States), Clarissa Baumann (b. 1988, Brazil), Lucia Bru (b. 1970, Belgium), Io Burgard (b. 1987, France), Anastasia Douka (b. 1979, Greece), Célia Gondol (b. 1985, France), DH McNabb (b. 1980, United States), Lucie Picandet (b. 1982, France) Curator: Gaël Charbau

The artists’ residencies programme in workshops Since 2010, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès has invited visual artists mentored by leading gures on the contemporary scene to discover the exceptional artisan skills applied at the Hermès workshops, primarily in France. The annual programme gives artists complete creative freedom to imagine and produce new works using the nest materials (silk, leather, silver, crystal…) in collaboration with the workshop artisans. Each residency is a unique creative adventure, challenging artists to re-locate their practice in a completely new context.

The mentors of this second cycle of residencies in Hermès workshops are: Jean-Michel Alberola (b. 1953, France), Ann Veronica Janssens (b. 1956, United Kingdom), Richard Fishman (b. 1941, United States).

The exhibition “With The Sleepless Hands, my aim is to focus attention on the movements and gestures I have observed through my conversations with artists and artisans who have taken part in the last three years of the residencies programme in the Hermès workshops.

It is not only conscious gestures, the result of deliberate ‘mind-to-hand or mind-to-body’ coordination, but the acquired autonomy of the skilled hand in particular, which acts as if ‘detached’ from the mind’s control.Artists and artisans are the repositories of this phenomenon.They take parallel, perfectly complementary approaches: artisans transmit gestures guided by expertise, while artists invent forms traversed by a spirit of laisser-faire.

At Palais de Tokyo, the works produced by the nine artists who have taken part over the past three years in the Residencies programme of the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès are being accompanied by other works by these same artists, so as to show the context in which they fit: from one studio to another, from an intimate space to a factory, from one intuition to the next... ” –Gaël Charbau