Marie-Hélène Cauvin is one of the artists in the exhibition ‘Haiti’.
November 19 till February 15, Grand Palais, Paris
About:
Marie-Hélène Cauvin was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and has been living in Montreal since 1971. She draws inspiration for her work in her native culture. The vacations she spent in removed regions of Haiti as a child made her discover a wonderful world as well as a very harsh reality.
These memories would later fuel her creative imagination. She explores the universe of legends and tales from her country intermingled with voodoo beliefs, stories of survival from a historical perspective, as well as other sources. Her work, goes beyond preoccupations specific to Haiti and questions the experience of life in contemporary societies, touching on current issues of violence, drugs and urban insecurity.
Freedom Fighters, 2007.
Marie-Hélène Cauvin has studied at Concordia University in Montreal, where she earned a B.A. in Fine Arts. She then pursued her studies in printmaking in the city of Philadelphia, at Temple University, were she earned her Masters degree. She taught lithography at Concordia University and hosted printmaking workshops in Montreal and Philadelphia.
In hiding, 2007.
About the exhibition:
Focusing on Haitian art from the 19th century to the present day, the exhibition takes an approach that is at once historical, social and cultural. Against a background of urban chaos and vigorous popular culture, this exploration of the visual arts aims to go beyond the archetypes of naïve and primitive painting and transcend the restrictive magico-religious and exotic vision associated with Haitian art.With nearly 150 works, Hyppolite’s Kiss or the Art of Haiti presents art free of any rigid framework, readily mingling poetry, magic, religion and political commitment thorough a great variety of forms, blurring the boundary between art and the street, between a world of forms and everyday life.
Bosou, 1995.
Curators: Régine Cuzin, freelance curator, founder of the association OCEA, Paris and Mireille Pérodin Jérôme, director of the Ateliers Jérôme, Port-au-Prince
This exhibition is organized by the Reunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais
Dominique, 2010.