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Intro
Caroline Mesquita

Caroline Mesquita, Source (detail), 2024

Photo: Jean-Christophe Lett

For her first institutional exhibition in a German-speaking country, the French artist Caroline Mesquita’s Verdet Bath is an installation in the form of a bathhouse and swimming pool at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark. Her humorous sculptures with a hybrid of animal, human, and robotic-like characteristics enter into a theatrical arrangement that challenges conventional ideas of how animals, nature and humans live together under the sign of technological advance.

Mesquita initially began her artistic career with a focus on mainly abstract and two-dimensional works featuring the outlines of people. In several early works, these figures begin to reach out of the picture into the room, emerging both from the surface and the material. In her current practice, Mesquita combines the materiality of oxidized and painted brass and copper plates with an eccentric and stage-appropriate light-heartedness: her metallurgical experiments result in life-size sculptures formed from sheet metal. It is almost as if she takes the contours of concrete spaces and translates them sculpturally into her characters.

Experiments with different types of patina are also an important strand of Mesquita’s practice, with the result that her sculptures take on a wide variety of colors, but in particular a characteristic green-grey, verdigris,’ to which the exhibition’s title refers, and is a shade commonly seen on metal roofs and sculptures in public spaces. Alongside this green-gray, Mesquita adds pink, yellow, blue and black tones to her color palette through various processes of oxidation. Thanks to these colors, her metallic figurines are brought to life, filling her installations with a sense of movement.

Mesquita is not concerned with depicting individuals or individual experiences, but rather social groups, investigating how certain situations and experiences arise solely in communities or gatherings. In her sculptural arrangements, she explores how gatherings come to be in the first place. Through her anthropomorphic, androgynous creatures, she aims at depicting a plurality of gestures which emerge uniquely through the encounter of different individuals. By bringing together groups and communities of different species, she crafts entirely new stories and narratives. Often she introduces dialogues to her sculptural work through films, in which her sculptures come to life and the artist herself appears as a protagonist, taking on a variety of different identities. In these stories, her relationships with the creatures can be tender, but they can also turn violent.

Some key influences on Mesquita’s practice are the films of Éric Rohmer (1920 – 2010), one of the founding fathers of the so-called Nouvelle Vague, a formative style of French cinema that achieved great fame in the late 1950s, as well as the Hollywood director and choreographer Busby Berkeley (1895 – 1976) and his musical productions, in which he used a large number of dancers as geometric elements and documented them on film. Dance choreography is another inspiration for Mesquita, namely the work of American Isadora Duncan (1877 – 1927), who is also known as the mother of modern dance. But the concrete, rhythmic-geometric formal language of Dadaism and in particular the practice of Sophie Taeuber-Arp has been one of the greatest influences on her aesthetic. It is from this wide range of influences that Mesquita developed the strong sense of interdisciplinarity that now defines her practice. She collaborates with the fashion industry and designer brands such as Hermès, working across disciplines to produce films inspired by her sculptural landscapes. In these films, she often takes on the role of the protagonist while also providing a stage for other actors to interact with her objects.

For her exhibition Verdet Bath, Caroline Mesquita also engages with the building’s architecture, creating an installation that spans the upper-floor rooms. Natural light streaming through the skylight ceiling of HALLE FÜR KUNST illuminates the space and is reflected in her swimming pool, adding a dynamic interplay of light and surface to the experience.