SPECTRAL IDENTITIES, ON A THIN CRYSTAL: MAI-THU PERRET | JEANNE SELMERSHEIM-DESGRANGE
Opening Thursday, April 2nd, 2026, 6PM - 8:30PM
Pavec is delighted to present an exhibition that brings together works by Mai-Thu Perret and Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange (1877–1958), curated by Sarina Basta.
In Spectral Identities, Mai-Thu Perret transforms the exhibition space into a bedroom—a mental and intimate interior. While the selected works by both artists include still lifes, floral arrangements, and portraits, their respective methodologies and chosen genres reveal distinct artistic positions. Though separated by nearly a century, the artists share a concern for methodology, modernist aesthetics, utopias, and the representation of domestic spaces and artifacts.
Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange employs the divisionist method: oil is applied in pure touches so that the juxtapositions of color are optically perceived as light. This technique is particularly evident in Portrait de Ginette Signac (c. 1916), where the child’s presence emerges through chromatic brushstrokes.
Born nearly a century later, Mai-Thu Perret introduces other types of methodologies into the exhibition, such as the Autoprogettazione by Enzo Mari (1932–2020), developed in 1974—a proto-DIY system of simple plans enabling anyone to build furniture. In Slow Wave (2014), a blown-glass face derived from the artist’s own appears to be asleep or dreaming on a bed inspired by Mari’s project. The reclining figure projects the space into a bedroom, a psychic interior. Recent ceramics from 2025, as well as the watercolor Untitled (Spider) (2025), appear as enigmatic containers—empty or full—quietly charged with potential.
The use of patterns form another point of convergence in the exhibition. In Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange’s paintings, tablecloths and wall motifs structure the compositions. In Untitled (Ginette jouant) (c. 1916) and Fleurs à la nappe bleue (c. 1919), ornate elements create a subtle interplay between figuration and abstraction—what painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) called ouvragé. The interior becomes a site of everyday realism but also of formal experimentation.
Mai-Thu Perret’s marbled tapestry Untitled (oval marble) (2015) or t Untitled (2023), a watercolor with a blue and white grid pattern, might likewise be considered ouvragé. Yet in Perret’s practice, interiors are never mere decor: they produce active fictions. Craft objects—ceramics, weavings—act as vessels for the transmission of knowledge. They critically restage the conditions of production that women artists have negotiated throughout modernist history.
The exhibition also foregrounds these differences in context. Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange worked at a time when the conditions of production for women artists were limited by restrictive social and institutional structures. Her involvement in Neo-Impressionism, as well as her life choices, already constituted forms of emancipation from the norms of her era. With her interest in craft and feminist narratives and critiques, Mai-Thu Perret creates singular universes that are informed by some of these historical contexts, reaffirming the importance of modernist female creators such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Varvara Stepanova while deploying her own set of aesthetic strategies and references.
From her contemporary standpoint, art history, modernist narratives, and science fiction can be replayed, displaced, or reinvented. Mai-Thu Perret stages imaginary communities to question the unfulfilled promises of the avant-garde or explores collaborations with posthumous artists, such as Ich bin wü ü ü ü ü ü ü ü tend with Sophie Taeuber-Arp at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, in 2023.
Thus, Spectral Identities, on a Thin Crystal juxtaposes two temporalities: one rooted in the methodologies of nascent modernism, the other invoking the ghosts, utopias, of these artistic references while developing new aesthetic and poetic strategies. In the room that forms the exhibition, portraits of children, flowers, snowy landscapes, ceramics, and sleeping faces coexist. Identities appear fragile, as if resting on a thin sheet of ice—a liminal zone between memory and fiction, visual structures and the abyss of reverie.
Sarina Basta is an art historian and exhibition curator. She currently lives between Paris and Geneva.
¹ This title comes from a text on Mai-Thu Perret and from a quatrain by Pierre-Charles Roy, quoted by Charlotte Hellman, the great-granddaughter of Selmersheim and Signac. Poetry is central to Mai-Thu's editorial practice, and her ability to invoke the avant-garde and fiction lends itself to an exhibition with an artist such as Jeanne, posthumous.
See respectively Lionel Bovier, ‘Mai-Thu Perret,’ in Mai-Thu Perret, Collection Cahiers d'Artistes, Pro Helvetia, 2006, p. 32, and Charlotte Hellman, Glissez Mortels !, Éditions Philippe Rey, Paris, 2019, p. 21.
