Lucie Fontaine

Lucie Fontaine was born in 1982 in Colmar, where she currently lives and works. In 2007, she opened a space in Milan, which was intended as a meeting place for the artistic community. More recently, she has expanded her activities through satellites in Tokyo and Bali, Indonesia. Together with her employees, she invites artists to exhibit in-house and, at the same time, exhibits her artworks, curates exhibitions, organizes lectures, and edits books elsewhere. She was invited to create projects for Marianne Boesky gallery in New York, Galerie Perrotin in Paris, Iaspis in Stockholm, and Artport in Tel Aviv, to name just a few.

Describing herself as an "art employer," Lucie Fontaine avoids harnessing her practice to a specific figure of the art field, preferring to cultivate a modus operandi driven solely by her relationship with two* employees, a concept of self-generated labor similar to the Master-Slave dialectic presented by Hegel is his master-piece, Phenomenology of Spirit. Her two* art employees like to define her as the Jamie Lynn Spears of contemporary art: "pregnant and in search of easy success." Thus, Lucie Fontaine incarnates the following three assumptions:
1) the anti-hierarchical perception of the art field, where artists, curators, gallerists, collectors, editors and critics are all considered "players" in the same game;
2) the theory of expanded practice, in which the artist is not only considered the "creator" of an artwork, but also a cultural operator able to write, manage galleries, curate, collect, etc.;
3) the consideration of the entire discourse around the artwork: conception / creation / production / presentation / distribution / communication / promotion.

* "L'Anti-Oedipe was written by the two of us, and since each of us was several, we were already quite a crowd." Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari