The next Artist You Need To Know is Geneviève Cadieux.
Cadieux is a Canadian artist who is best known for her large-scale photographic works : she has installed a number of evocative works in urban spaces that challenge both our ideas of photography and audience. She lives in Montréal.
From Concordia University : “Geneviève Cadieux uses theatrical and cinematic tropes in combination with advertising strategies to construct poignant photographic works and large-scale installations that test the limits of the medium while addressing the themes of the human body and the landscape in their mutual implication.”
Her words : “The difference in scale should normally produce a disequilibrium in the spectator and, possibly, enable him / her to see those things which might by unseen at a smaller scale, a little bit like close ups, slow-motion or fast-motion cinema, where they are able to have a revealing effect, and thus illuminate those things which normally would rest hidden.”
Cadieux was born in Montreal in 1955 and earned a BA in Visual Arts from University of Ottawa : she has been a teacher at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris, 1994) and École nationale des beaux-arts (Grenoble, 1996). Since 1991, she has taught at Concordia University in Montréal where she now holds the position of associate professor in the Studio Arts Department at that institution.
Since the early 1990s, Cadieux’s exhibition record has been impressive, including how she has represented Canada in 3 major international biennials: Venice (1990), Sydney (1988, 1990), and Sao Paulo (1987). Other notable exhibitions of her work have taken place at the National Gallery of Canada, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Miami Art Museum, Tate Gallery (London, UK), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée départemental d’art contemporain (Rochechouart, France) and Museum Van Hadendaagse Kunst (Antwerp, Belgium). Cadieux was also included in the important off site installation The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Times Square Astrovision, New York (2002).
In 2011 she was a recipient of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Cadieux is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was awarded the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas (in 2018).
A more detailed listing of Cadieux’s accomplishments, exhibitions and awards can be seen here.
From the National Gallery of Canada : Geneviève Cadieux’s “work explores topics of identity, gender, and the human body. She presents the body as a landscape, focusing on small details (such as a mouth, bruise, or scar) in extreme close-ups. Cadieux is also interested in the way that art integrates into the urban environment. Many of her works are currently installed in public spaces.”
The first two images in the gallery below are an example of Cadieux’s installations in the public sphere, and a video of that piece (which was installed in Paris) can be enjoyed here.
From here : Geneviève Cadieux “is concerned with the question of the body as the locus of an intersection between the private and the public domains. Often, family members have served as models in her photographic works. Perception, identity, empathy and human suffering are some of the existential questions examined by the artist in abstract as well as figurative modes.”
The critic and curator Peggy Gale offered the following about Cadieux’s works in Canadian Art Magazine : “Framed by intellect, grounded in emotion, the works of Geneviève Cadieux have a haunting quality, a certain knowing anxiety […] Cadieux’s installations using large-scale color photographs recall both the heroic traditions of painting and the glamor of mass-media advertising. The work is personal yet conceptually charged, and whether or not one is fortified with readings on “the gaze,” the viewer as subject, the body as site, the whole arsenal of semiotic and critical theory, there is no denying the work’s stature and sensual power.”
Much more about Cadieux’s work and ideas can be seen here. Several videos of her work and conversations with the artist – as she often creates immersive spaces and the scale and installation of her artwork are sometimes better conveyed through video documentation – can be enjoyed here (from the National Gallery), here and here.