Isa Melsheimer
COMPOST
Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain / MAMAC
Place Yves Klein
06364 Nice
November 20, 2021 – February 27, 2022
Opening Friday November 19, 7 pm
www.mamac-nice.org

Isa Melsheimer's practice spans across painting, embroidery, and sculpture, as well as the plant world. Her work questions the complex and evolving relationship between humans and their environment, addressing topical issues such as ecological transformations and sustainability.

For her solo exhibition at the MAMAC, the artist delved into the rich history of the Côte d'Azur, a territory of experimentation of modern architecture that has left a varied, sometimes surprising, legacy of villas, nestled in the midst of hills and palm trees. This intertwined destiny of adventurous patrons, open to the innovations of their time, and innovative architects, intersects with the imaginary of an eternal Riviera and its much desired landscapes. The palm tree—even though introduced during the 19th century at a time when international winter tourism was developing—appears today as an indigenous plant and a symbol of the French Riviera.

With COMPOST, Isa Melsheimer proposes a hybridization of this dreamed and fantasized Riviera and its transformation of the shoreline due to the infestation of palm trees by the red palm weevil. The exhibition space is transformed into a dreamlike and metamorphic landscape in which ceramics of insect's larva and evocations of modernist architectures intertwine, creating the soil, perhaps fertile, of a story to come.

See @mamacnice_officiel on Instagram for further information on the exhibition.