The artist has been working on painting in situ for several years. The raw material of the walls, floors and ceilings is her field of intervention. The peculiar feature of her work is that it’s done directly on site. The colourful painting of the young visual artist will cover the 160 square metres of grey concrete walls, transforming the museum’s roof terrace into a poetic space. “The painting I’ll create for the terraces of the Mamac will interact with the tired concrete, incorporating its traces into the pictorial approach, revealing its relief, its pores and making the link between the museum building and the city”, the artist explains.

This exhibition is an opportunity to take the full measure of the encounter of a place with an imaginary world, a place she reveals and revisits through her chromatic palette. “I will start from the cold colours of metal and windows with green reflections to gradually develop my palette in relation to the multiplicity of shades that can be seen in Nice. My painting will echo the colourful spots that can be seen from the terraces over the city, but it will also be related to parts not visible from these points of view, as well as the very fantasy of the Mediterranean that’s been instrumental in the evolution of the city of Nice”, she explains.

Flora Moscovici explores the question of light, its variations and its radiance. For this project, she will work with pigments, casein and lime water that will fix the paint in place by incorporating the traces of the concrete, revealing its relief and pores. She will proceed by friction and penetration rather than by covering or masking the surface. But while the place is the primary source of inspiration for the artist, it’s also under the influence of the historical and cultural context of the Côte d’Azur on which the chromatic expression of the city may have depended that Flora Moscovici’s artistic research was stimulated. The polychrome old town under Italian influence, the white city of winter tourism of aristocrats and intellectuals from all over Europe, the exotic fashion of the dream-like Orient combined with the myths of Greco-Roman antiquity, the colourful marbles and mosaics in the taste of Charles Garnier are all currents that passed through and nourished the artist in the production of her painting. “I’m very attached to Garnier’s ideas on the importance of polychromy in the city, and I find it extremely interesting how the exaltation of colour, for a city like Nice, came to symbolise the place of the exceptional and the wonderful, the picturesque… I want to work mainly with mineral pigments, which retain a special place in the construction industry on the Mediterranean coast”, comments the artist.

 

Flora Moscovici was born in 1985, and now lives and works in Paris. Having graduated from the Paris-Cergy National School of Arts in 2011, she exhibited in several art centres, galleries, museums and associations in France, Europe, the United States and Canada.

In 2021, she completed an order for a Helen’s Stairway staircase for the headquarters of Villa Albertine in New York – Cultural Services of the French Embassy, an order for the Ministry of Culture, Cité Polychrome, as part of Project Camus for the creation of works on construction facilities, Rue de Valois, Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue Croix des Petits-Champs, and an order for the Hermès women’s spring/summer 2022 fashion show. She also presented a performance in the Pompidou Centre in collaboration with Lina Schlageter. Her work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine Méca, the Villa Arson Art Centre, Ateliers Vortex, Moly-Sabata, Shed, Dundee Contemporary Arts and more.

Flora Moscovici approaches painting from a specific context, the techniques used varying depending on the project, but colour and light are always central elements. Her interventions modify the perception of space and bring together various temporalities, that of the pictorial gesture, the memory of the place and the history of painting between sacred and vernacular.

 

Exhibition curator: Martine Meunier

MAMAC Manager: Hélène Guenin

Assistants: Lassana Sarre and Paul Bogard

 

The exhibition has the support of Sennelier, colours for artists since 1887.