Silhouettes

Fitzpatrick Gallery is proud to present Silhouettes Arthur Marie’s second exhibition with the gallery in Paris, opening Saturday April 26th at Passage Sainte-Anne.

Eight rectangular canvases occupy the vitrines of Passage Sainte-Anne. Each holds a solitary, nearly life-sized figure composed of modular, jointed body parts. While in composition or tone the works may echo certain old master techniques, Marie’s process is intuitive, more of a personal interpretation than a faithful replication; an ongoing experiment. Marking a shift from previous methods, rather than glaze, the tableaux surfaces are the result of a layering of opaque paint. The interplay between the varnished surfaces, reminiscent of historical portraiture and gaunt subjects, who wouldn’t seem out of place in a video game’s apocalyptic landscape, create an atmosphere that is at once reverent and foreboding.

Presented behind glass in one of Paris’s oldest covered passages, the figures could be mistaken, at first glance, for broken mannequins: an eerie yet fitting image in Sentier, a neighborhood long associated with the textile and garment industries. Branching off the historic rue Sainte-Anne, a sensory crossroads where spice-laden air and antiques blend with echoes of avant-garde legacies, including Suzy Solidor’s pioneering 1930s nightclub, the street endures as a cross road for all strata of society. Today, as the area evolves into a tech and design hub, Marie’s work exists in the liminal — neither of the past nor the future, anchored outside of time, much like Passage Sainte-Anne herself.

Each figure is the result of an exhaustive process of collection and mutation. Marie draws from a vast archive of historic photographs, fashion editorials, medical imagery, and internet ephemera, including forgotten blogs and niche image boards. These references are dissected, layered, and purposefully diluted, with clothing and features deliberately stripped of decade-specific or cultural markers. Figures that are timeless, ageless, and placeless — haunting composites of fragmented identities. Works are titled through a similar manner of foraging, unravelling language using lists and coded references.

Despite their polished execution, the works resist narrative clarity. Faces are untelling, details withheld. The figures elude categorization: suspended between luxury and austerity, fashion and flesh, human and lifeless puppet. Rather than assign meaning, Marie encourages the figures autonomy, inviting the viewer to their own projected interpretation, be that of a stranger in the recent past, or friends of a future never realized. The vitrines frame the characters, not only as artworks but also as items for observation, between object, effigy and human — both intimate and untouchable.

Arthur Marie

(b. 1996, Cherbourg, France) lives and works in Paris.

Recent solo exhibitions include Convivial Activity, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris (2023); Serenity, Queer Thoughts, New York (2023) and Struggle for Pleasure, Plymouth Rock, Zurich (2022). Forthcoming solo exhibitions are scheduled at Francis Irv, New York (2025) and Final Hot Desert, London (2025).

Selected group exhibitions include The Poster Show, Sentiment, Zürich (2025); Onsen Confidential, Kayokoyuki Gallery, Tokyo (2024); The falcon cannot hear the falconer, Council +, Berlin (2024); Display, Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles (2024); and Haute Références, Gnossienne Gallery, London (2024).

Marie has participated in residencies at Arca Program, Doc (Paris); Bubahof (Prague); Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers); La Cherche (Cherbourg); and La Fabrique (Caen).