Opening: Thursday, September 4, 2025, 17:00 - 21:00
Exhibition: September 4 - December 13, 2025
The cosmos is a dizzying thought, but our species has created languages to make sense of that which surpasses us – religion, science, poetry. Amélie Bouvier’s work explores how our society observes and interprets the sky, researching astronomical imagery to situate our understanding of space in its cultural and historical context.
In her new Photodessinographie series, Bouvier creates drawings from archival solar images in the Observatoire de Paris - Meudon. These negative photos on deteriorating glass plates show the Sun as a dark shadow, marred by a century of scratches and fingerprints. The artist reproduces the photos with an almost mechanical precision, using graphite and ink to capture the image of the past star as well as its support – the subtle depth of the glass, the traces of damage, its dissolving chemicals. With these observational drawings of a gradual disappearance, she reflects on the distance between a fixed image and our evolving reality.
Bouvier’s textile works emphasize the fictional aspect of our spatial representations: drawings on canvas and large-scale panels depict extraterrestrial landscapes, taking from two centuries of astronomical imagery. Each work blends elements of drawing and photography into an autonomous narrative space, a montage in which heterogeneous sources coexist to tell a story. Together, they reflect on the human desire for celestial occupation, and what these projects reveal about our own fictions, anxieties, and delusions.
Amélie Bouvier uses drawing as a form of visual analysis, a tool for acute observation in our image-saturated world. Engaging with light and transparency, knowledge and fantasy, place and placelessness, she proposes a new relevance for the medium – searching for the blind spots in our fields of vision.
Amélie Bouvier (b. 1982) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Her artistic practice builds from historical research in the field of astronomy to question issues related to cultural memory and collective heritage. Astronomers in particular, and scientists in general, don’t only explain the world, they also represent it through the construction of diagrams, illustrations, photographs or equations. For Bouvier, scientific imagery is an extension of knowledge that reveals ideological and ethical frameworks, which risk cloaking aspects of the reality they aim to represent. She is particularly interested in the sky and stars as a landscape that exposes current socio-political contradictions and knowledge gaps. While her work is based on historical facts, data and visuals, she consistently mixes this with speculative imagery, adapting tools and techniques to present alternative potentialities.
Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (Aomori, JP); Galeria Arsenał (Białystok, PL); CHRONIQUES - Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques (Aix-en-Provence, FR); ISELP contemporary art center (Brussels, BE); and the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid, ES). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris, FR); Le Pavillon Namur (BE); Festival Safra’Numériques (Amiens, FR); Sesc Ipiranga (São Paulo, BR); the Verbeke Foundation (Kemzeke, BE); the Museo de Arte Prehispánico Rufino Tamayo (Oaxaca, MX); the Cerveira International Art Biennial (Cerveira, PT); and many others. Her first monograph, Staring Into the Night, was published by Hopper & Fuchs in 2024.
