carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with the French artist Hélène Delprat. This will be her first comprehensive exhibition with the gallery. Primarily known as a painter in the early days of her career, Delprat withdrew from public view in the mid-90s for nearly fifteen years to immerse herself in a series of “submerged practices” — namely writing, drawing, scenography film, radio, documentary and video. The breadth of Delprat’s creative practice attests to an omnivorous curiosity. She bends time-periods, genre, and the limits of taste to craft a conceptual and pictorial universe that is as immersive as it is idiosyncratic from a vast archive of literary, historical, film, and pop cultural references.

Processes of citation and translation abound in the work of Hélène Delprat. An indefatigable collector of both contemporary and historical imagery and texts, Delprat’s references serve as a spark or catalyst, yet the final result holds little respect for the original. She deforms, amplifies, exaggerates and multiplies her source material to create assemblages that are, as the artist says herself, “at times chaotic, a kind of montage and magnetization of forms and ideas that comes together in different ways.” Such assemblages, which can be destroyed at any time, thus imbue the images with another meaning and allow them to tell another story.