Anaël Pigeat
Anaël Pigeat is an art critic, journalist, and curator. She has held prestigious positions such as editor-in-chief of the magazine art press before becoming editor-at-large for the French edition of The Art Newspaper . She regularly contributes to the culture section of Paris Match and is very active on France Culture, where she has participated in several programs including La Dispute and À Voix Nue . She also produces her own podcast, Phonomaton . Among her achievements are the book Alice Neel, les émotions (Flammarion) and the curation of exhibitions of Dana Schutz, le monde visible at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Untitled, 2010 (Mickey, Achziv) (2010), Tami Notsani, Photography, 100x100 cm
A curation committed to the living and its metamorphoses
Anaël Pigeat's Bestiary selection is part of a reflection on the unity and diversity of life. Inspired by Apollinaire's Procession of Orpheus, this curation revisits the traditional bestiary to project it into our times. It highlights the central place of animals, real or imaginary, symbolic or technological, in our relationship with the world. This work questions the boundaries between nature, humanity, and machines, while exploring the emotions and stories hidden behind each creature.
A contemporary bestiary mixing poetry, melancholy and hybridization
The selection brings together ten emblematic works combining animals, chimeras, and human figures in a rich and protean universe. It features contemporary Adam and Eve, embodied by Anne Roger-Lacan's L'homme Heureux (2020)—a papier-mâché sculpture adorned with coral on a glass base—and Marcel Miracle's Une dame très sélect (2017), a three-dimensional collage representing a lion's head. These human figures coexist with Elsa Sahal's Dancing Twins (2021), ceramic sculptures that play on the motif of the breast to compose two female figures with divergent gazes.
Alongside this, the bestiary includes more melancholic and narrative presences, such as Tami Notsani's Untitled, 2010 (Mickey, Achziv) : a photograph evoking the desertion of a once festive place, where Mickey's dented head silently testifies to human disillusionment and plastic pollution. Mark Dion's contemporary cabinet of curiosities is manifested in Between Voltaire and Poe (2016), a sculpture where plastic dinosaurs and mythical creatures confront each other, questioning the boundaries between reality, imagination, nature, and culture.
Dancing twins (2021), Elsa Sahal, Sculpture - Clay, 342x300 cm
The selection also includes fragile and chaotic machines, like the drawing Mixed-up (2022) by Zhenya Machneva, which reproduces a tangle of wires and cables, and sensitive portraits like OCYTOCINE (Ethan & son ours) (2023) by Sophie Bramly, a photograph of a young woman tenderly holding her childhood teddy bear.
Finally, winged and hybrid beings materialize in the dreamlike forms of Jean Messagier's pink phoenix ( Untitled , 1975) and in the symmetrical waves painted by James Rielly ( We lived together under the sea , 2021), where immense eyes seem to observe from an aquatic world suspended between dream and reality.
This contemporary bestiary thus displays a profusion of real, fantastic, mechanical and organic beings, offering an exploration that is at once poetic, melancholic and critical of our relationship with the living and its multiple metamorphoses.
"Untitled" 1975 (1975), Jean Messagier, Drawing, 76x106 cm
An invitation to rethink our view of life and its metamorphoses
With this selection, Anaël Pigeat offers a fresh perspective on life and its many forms, blending history, poetry, and contemporary issues. She invites the viewer to perceive differently the richness and complexity of the beings that populate our world, as well as the chimeras that inhabit it. Bestiary is an ode to the diversity of life, at the intersection of disciplines and imaginations.
Nicolas Sarazin
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