The process of restoration is anachronistic by nature. It proposes to return an artwork to its original pristine state by eliminating any damage or other evidence of the passage of time. The restorer induces the artwork to live in the present as it did in the past, but in so doing alters its historical significance and risks confusing its temporality. This traversal of time is the key to Marine Hugonnier’s exhibition at Max Wigram Gallery. A restorer will be resident in the gallery over a five-week period (Tues – Fri, 1 – 6pm; Sat, 12 – 5pm), working on a number of paintings carefully chosen on subjects that run through the artist’s practice. These start with a 17th century Dutch landscape (Study Of A Tree), carry on with an 18th century French urban scene (Museum On Fire), and two 19th century landscapes (The Avalanche; Study On The Reality Of Apparition). As each restoration is completed, the paintings will be hung in the gallery space. The exhibition examines the process of restoration as an endeavour spanning two moments in time: the production of the art work (A) and its reception (C). By focusing on the time in between (B), the restoration itself highlights the temporality of an art work, subtly changing its conditions of visibility. The exhibition will initially feature only a working laboratory including an easel, chair, cabinet, cleaning paraphernalia and a trained restorer. Viewers will be invited back to the gallery to witness the project’s fruition.

Hugonnier’s practice has been strongly influenced by her background and long-standing interest in anthropology and philosophy. She explores the idea of perception as determined by historical, social and political ramifications, and the way these affect our experience of the present moment. She works with film, still photography and installation, but it is never the final product that is of greatest interest to her - rather the experience and process of a work’s creation and the dialogues generated around it. Since the 19th century, tools of analysis and perception such as photography and cinema have, through their ubiquity, shaped a particular and pervasive ideological and perceptual viewpoint. Hugonnier’s films, each immersed in particular localities within Asia, Europe and South America - treat landscapes as a form of cultural mediation and as social constructions that inform the conventions of their representation. The trilogy questions these conventions and ideologies and the tools that have helped establish them.

Marine Hugonnier was born in Paris in 1969. She is currently working in London. Her upcoming solo exhibitions (2007 – 08) are at S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA and the MAMCO in Geneva. Her work is part of the Arts Council of England Collection, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Foundation.