Le Prix du Frac Bretagne–Art Norac

Tania Gheerbrant
Born in 1994, lives and works in Quimper and Courtils.

She graduated from EESAB – site de Rennes in 2014, then from ENSBA-Paris in 2017. Her art, based on long-term research and forms of co-creation, mainly takes the form of installations, videos and editions.
Her work has been shown in various group exhibitions in institutions, including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); Bally Foundation, Lugarno, Switzerland (2023); Chapelle des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2022); 66e Salon de Montrouge (2022); Point Commun, Annecy (2021); Fondation Fiminco, Romainville (2021); Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021); Panacée MoCo, Montpellier (2019); La villa Radet, Paris (2019); or The Other Art Fair, Turin, Italia (2018).

Tania Gheerbrant focusses on the question of the norm in mental health, and in particular in what psychiatry calls auditory ‘hallucination’. Rather than seeing this disorder as a mere symptom, she sees it as an expanded perception of the world.
For the past two years, Tania Gheerbrant has been working with the ‘Réseau des Entendeurs de Voix’ (REV), a community founded in the Netherlands in 1988 and active in France since 2011. The REV enables people to share their experiences and tame their voices without resorting to confinement or medication. These talking circles aim for collective ‘recovery’. The artist’s research comes at a time when staff shortages in hospitals are forcing the use of isolation rooms and the proliferation of psychotropic treatments.
In the exhibition, she is displaying a large fresco that recomposes the words and images of the newsletter Gardes Fous, founded by psychiatrists and patients in Paris in 1974, and the Canadian fanzine In a Nutshell, created by a patients’ association in 1971.
The artist is also presenting the film Twin in the Clouds and Other Stories, in which she brings together testimonies about the understanding of voices and recovery. An actor replaces the interviewee when anonymity requires it; a cabaret singer covers a Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine song rewritten by the artist; poems composed over fifty years ago, read by a hearing person and his mother, echo in the forest.

Ilan Michel

The Tania Gheerbrant’s work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria in May 2025.

The 4 finalists of the Frac Bretagne – Art Norac Award 2024 are:

Charles-Arthur Feuvrier

Born in 1997, he lives and works in Marseille.
Charles-Arthur Feuvrier is a Mauritian-French artist who graduated from ESA Réunion and ENSBA Lyon. He works mainly in sculpture and digital imaging. He uses central figures, icons, characters and symbols to create forms and narratives. Most often drawn from mainstream Internet culture, these figures are manipulated to explore our relationship with reality and globalization. His work has been shown at Buropolis (Marseille), CAP Saint-Fons, CAC La Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel) and La Villette (Paris), among others. Co-founder of Monopôle, an artist-run-space, he is one of the winners of the Mécènes du Sud Aix-Marseille grant in 2022 and is taking part in the GENERATOR program in 2023.

Tania Gheerbrant

Born in 1990, she lives and works in Paris.
She graduated from EESAB-site de Rennes in 2014, then from ENSBA-Paris in 2017. Her art, based on long-term research and forms of co-creation, mainly takes the form of installations, videos and editions.

Her work has been shown in various group exhibitions in institutions, including: Palais de Tokyo (2024-FR); Bally Foundation (2023 – CH); Chapelle des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2022-FR); 66e Salon de Montrouge (2022-FR); Point Commun (2021-FR); Fondation Fiminco (2021-FR); Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021-FR); Panacée MoCo, Montpellier (2019-FR); La villa Radet (2019-FR); or The Other Art Fair, Turin (2018-IT).

She is the recipient of various grants, residency programs and awards, including the Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts, the Cité Internationale des Arts residency or Ateliers Vivegnis International in Belgium. Her latest works have been commissioned by the Fondation Bally and supported by the Palais de Tokyo and the DRAC Île-de-France.

Germain Marguillard

Born in 1994, he lives and works in Rennes.
A 2021 graduate of EESAB – Rennes, Germain Marguillard is developing a practice focused on sculptural and scenographic gestures. By interweaving forms relating to the quest to understand our universe through the ages, he creates syncretic objects that combine motifs drawn from both archaeology and contemporary technologies. His sculptures take advantage of the power of images on our subconscious, becoming vessels for a new spirituality in which the great myths of the past and the societal issues of the present merge.

Her work has since been shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions, including Passerelle, Centre d’Art Contemporain (Brest), DOC (Paris), Hotel Pasteur and Quatre artistrunspace (Rennes).

Julie Sas

Born in 1990, she lives and works in Paris.
A 2015 graduate of HEAD-Geneva, artist and author, her practice unfolds in the form of installations, videos, poetry, editions, experimental pedagogies, essays, and translations. Conceptual in nature, her artistic and literary work articulates social objects and languages situated around games of meaning, norms and identities that demonstrate a tension with certain political and social data. In particular, he analyzes the management of affects in our societies of control, the logics of internalized surveillance and the regimes of impulsiveness generated by our modes of governance and consumption.

Recent solo exhibitions include “XD” at Maison populaire de Montreuil (2022), “OK OK K.O” at Treignac Projet, (2022), “Like a candle in the wind” at Les Limbes (Saint-Étienne, 2023) and “Numéro France” at Pauline Perplexe (Arcueil, 2023) in 2021 she is resident at Maison de la Poésie de Rennes. She is the author of “Notes de la rédaction” published in 2017 by Héros-Limite and “Le grand soir est-il” published in 2023 by Presses séparées de Marseille.

Their work was presented at the Frac Bretagne from October 11, 2024 to January 05, 2025 as part of a group exhibition.

French website

Founded in Salzburg in 1844, the Salzburger Kunstverein is one of Austria’s oldest and most prestigious contemporary art institutions. Housed in the city’s historic Künstlerhaus, the Salzburger Kunstverein presents exhibitions and projects by artists who are shaping today’s artistic discourse and giving a broad public access to art and its debates.

Céline Le Guillou

Céline Le Guillou
Born in 1994, lives and works in Quimper and Courtils.
Céline Le Guillou studied at the ESAAA in Annecy, then at the EESAB-site de Quimper where she obtained her diploma in 2018. Attentive to what happens in the studio, to the act of creation as such, her approach is underpinned by the attention given to the materials she uses. She then perfected her skills in clay techniques at the European Institute of Ceramic Arts in the Haut-Rhin. She continued with several exhibition projects, including the residency programme Les Chantiers at Passerelle centre d’art contemporain in Brest and the Minoterie21 residency in Morbihan.

Earth is an infinite source of inspiration, which, fortunately, millennia of creation have still not dried up. It was there, it seems, before anything else, and will remain there, after all. Céline Le Guillou has taken that into account. If they’re going to live together for a long time, they might make sure it’s a pleasant one.
So, with her two curious and passionate hands, she massages her beloved earth, feeling it, cradling it and examining it, brooding over it and raising the temperature until she finds the one that suits her best. On the ground, the earth swarms in small, smooth mounds that borrow their shapes from clouds, weights or a loaf of bread, just as ready to soar to the heavens as to anchor itself firmly to the ground or fill our stomachs. On the walls, it mixes with water, transforms into paint, liquid, vaporous, as if to signify the states it can take on when it is quietly withdrawn into its kiln, waiting for the artist to come and retrieve it.
The earth is an infinite source of mystery, and Céline Le Guillou has an insatiable appetite for it. And the two meet with delight. The earth contains a little of everything that surrounds it, inhabits it and covers it for the duration of this pleasant cohabitation. It is these spontaneous and almost magical inputs and components that the artist strives to catalogue as she manipulates, in order to find the recipe that will link the familiar and the unknown in a true place of her own.
Horya

Horya Makhlouf, art critic, cultural mediator and art historian

Céline Le Guillou will be in residence at the Instituto Inclusartiz in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in March and April 2024. At the end of this residency, her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition.

Fanny Gicquel
Born in 1992, lives and works in Rennes.

Graduated from EESAB-Rennes in 2018, Fanny Gicquel is a 2021 winner of the Marfa Prize. In addition, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hua International gallery in Berlin (2021), at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain in Brest (2020) and at The left right Place in Reims (2020). She has participated in the group exhibitions Art Souterrain in Montreal (2021), the 10th Prix de la Jeune Création de Saint-Rémy (2021) and Nanjing International Art Fair in China (2020).
Fanny Gicquel develops moving and fine environments within which the viewer’s body is invited to move. Her installations appear as microcosms in which the different elements maintain mutually interdependent relationships.

Whether placed on the floor or hanging from the ceiling, Fanny Gicquel’s objects, made of glass, metal or textile, are an invitation to the touch and aim to create a form of intimacy with the viewer. Her artworks therefore exist in two phases: contemplation and manipulation, allowing her to explore the border between the animate and the inanimate.
This also manifests through experimentation with changing materials such as paraffin and heat sensitive paint that escape a final form, evoking impermanence and the multiplicity of things that surround us.
The installations are always accompanied by scenarios of activation, imagined by the artist and executed by performers. They interact with the objects in a discrete or sometimes almost unnoticeable manner, until they create images close to a living painting, which invites to slow down and contemplate.
For her new installation at Frac Bretagne, the artist draws the outline of a moving and transitory landscape, occupied by sculptures which enter into a direct relationship with the architecture of the venue hosting them. Harmoniously displayed in the space, the artworks create a new synergy, allowing the different materials to subtly communicate with each other and to interact with the viewer’s body.

Elena Cardin, curator of the exhibition

Fanny Gicquel presents a solo exhibition at the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) in Dublin, Ireland from May to July 2023.

Corentin Canesson
Born in 1988, lives and works in Brest and Paris.

Graduated from EESAB-Rennes in 2011, he participated to the 21st Prize of Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Le Fil d’Alerte. He has presented solo exhibitions at Sator gallery in Paris (2020), at Nathalie Obadia gallery in Paris (2018), at Crédac – Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry-sur- Seine (2017) and at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain in Brest (2015).

Corentin Canesson practices painting as one would cover a music standard. Well aware of the medium’s history, he simultaneously works on abstract and figurative canvases, playing with resurgence of more or less confessed or hidden references to the paintings of Bram Van Velde or Philip Guston.

The “figures” inhabiting these series are to be understood here in the sense of “pretexts” to (continue to) paint. Whether the lyrics of a song by Yo La Tengo, the color of a book cover, a bird with a long beak are often the starting point for long series. Never really completed, the series continue to develop over the years, incorporating variables such as the format of the canvas or the exhibition budget.

For Mauve Zone (exhibition of the nominees of the Frac Bretagne-Art Norac Award 2021), paintings made between 2010 and 2017 are displayed side by side along with canvases freshly painted on site,  within a triple line. This display lacking unit of time or chronology is like an “ongoing retrospective” highlighting the strange permanence that operates whithin the work of Corentin Canesson where the oldest paintings are regularly brought into play, where abstract series closely rub shoulders with figurative works. As a space porous to music, Corentin Canesson’s pictorial work goes hand in hand with his practice as a guitarist in the experimental rock band The Night He Came Home. Without defined contours, this band constitutes another collaborative space to record and perform alongside other artists.

Corentin Canesson presents a solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, USA from January 28 to March 12, 2022..

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