AGATHE DE BAILLIENCOURT

Agathe de Bailliencourt's artistic practice encompasses painting, drawing, film, installation, and sculpture, with a recurring focus on recording time. Since 2017, she's been exploring the reality of the present moment, exploring questions such as loss of control, collapse, acceleration, chain reactions, and more recently, changes of state and transformation.

For her first intaglio project Agathe de Bailliencourt produced a series of two etchings that are entitled Pre-delay. Those intaglio works continue the artist's research initiated with a series of ink drawings gathered under the title Split Focus. In this series Agathe de Bailliencourt references an optical lens frequently used in cinema to obtain the effect of expanding the depth of the filmed plain so that both the foreground and the background could be in focus.

With Pre-delay Agathe de Bailliencourt alludes to the phenomena known in the audio world as a vibrating echo of a sound. When looking at the etchings it becomes clear that each motive is formed out of two parts. Expanding from the left to the right the copper plates where worked using two different etching techniques, spit-bite and suger lift aquatint. While the right side of the composition shows a solid carbon black brushstroke the left side changes character and seems to be a subdued image of what we see to the right.The depth of field changes from textured, volatile, blurry graphite gradients to sharp graphic strokes ending in colour.

The physical interval between the two states adds spatiality and a cinematic language reminiscent of film strip frames.

The softness of the spit-bite changes register to the graphic sharpness of the sugar lift, which shifts colour at the edge while maintaining clarity of vision. Colour is applied manually to each etching, adding another layer that disrupts the coherence of the black and white. This acts as a glitch, an interference between the traditional intaglio printmaking technique used to produce the work and today’s widely used digital reproductive printing methods.

Agathe de Bailliencourt, born 1974, Paris, France. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She received a BFA from École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Cergy Pontoise, Paris (FR) and an MFA from Ecole Boulle, Paris (FR).

Agathe de Bailliencourt’s recent exhibitions and site-specific installations include Smash Cut, Alice Folker Gallery, Copenhagen (DK), Making things go, Adrian Sutton Gallery, Paris (FR) and a permanent installation for the E.r.e.a François Truffaut, Mainvilliers (FR). Her work is included in the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (DE) and Graphothek Berlin, Berlin (DE). She is the recipient of The Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Artists Grant.