List of products by brand Nadine Altmayer
Born in France
EDUCATION
Ecole des Beaux-Arts Angers 49
SELECTION OF EXHIBITIONS
2023
Amelie, Maison d'Art, Ainsi de suite avec Christian Grelier
Galerie Séguier
2018
Galerie Zeuxis
2016
Bouchemaine
2015
Galerie des Iles Lointaines, Angers
Résidence d' artiste, l'Ecloserie, La Flotte, Ile de Ré
Galerie Lionelle Courbet, Paris 7eme
2013
Les Renaudières, Carquefou
Galerie Samagra, Paris 6ème
2012
Galerie Nadine Gallery, paris 1er
2011
MAC Paris 2011, porte Champerret, Paris 17ème
Abbaye de St Florent le Vieil
2010
MAC Paris 2010, porte de Champerret, Paris 17ème
Galerie A Vous de Voir, St Mathurin sur Loire
2009
Château de Carrouges
2008
Chapelle des Ursulines, Ancenis
Galerie du Rayon Vert, Nantes
Grand Théâtre, Angers
2007
Centre d'Art de Montrelais
2006
Galerie Patrick Gaultier, Quimper
Art et Chapelles
2005
Salon Triptyque, Angers
Foire d'Art Contemporain ST'ART, Strasbourg
Nadine Altmayer (Metz, 1956) is a French artist who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Angers and now lives and works between Paris and Anjou. She describes herself as a weaver: it is weaving, rather than painting or sculpture, that forms the foundation of her entire practice, and it is from this craft that she draws her vocabulary and techniques.
Her method always begins with a construction and moves towards a controlled destruction. On a woven warp or on recycled materials, she applies dyes using acrylic or Indian ink, then covers the surface with liquid clay which, as it dries, stiffens the fabric and sets its folds like a second skin. Then comes the reverse process: armed with a sander, she attacks this crust in places, wears away the material, tears, sews and patches it up, until what the previous layer had buried reappears in fragments. Nothing is left intact: everything is aged before her very eyes, in the studio, even before it is exhibited.
From this interplay emerge series with almost technical names — Trames, Armures, Grilles, Totems — which draw on the rigour of the vocabulary of architecture and weaving, whilst never forsaking the element of chance. The Armures, stretched with almost invisible metal wires, contrast the brutality of their knots with a silhouette reminiscent of samurai armour. The Grilles, on the other hand, lighten the gesture: here, metal becomes a loop, lead becomes a bead, and the void counts for just as much as the material.
"Compose, decompose, recompose": this formula, with which the artist herself describes her approach, sums up a body of work that refuses to limit textile expression to a single technique.
This approach to creating a work by deliberately ageing it places Altmayer within a history of weaving that predates her own: the history that Anni Albers, at the Bauhaus and later at Black Mountain College, had elevated from craftsmanship to a visual language in its own right, in which the thread is as significant as the line in a drawing. But Altmayer shifts this legacy into darker territory, one that owes less to the loom than to an entirely different material: lead. Like Anselm Kiefer, who loads his canvases with lead, ash and straw to imbue them with the weight of collective memory, Altmayer chooses heavy, tarnished materials so that her pieces appear already ancient, already excavated — relics that have just been unearthed rather than objects that have just been made. For both artists, ruin is not something endured: it is constructed, with as much care as that which it is supposed to have destroyed.
Having exhibited since 2005 (at the Château de Carrouges, the Chapelle des Ursulines in Ancenis, the Galerie du Rayon Vert in Nantes, and the ST’ART fair in Strasbourg), Altmayer is now represented by the Amélie du Chalard gallery in Paris and New York.
