Timothy Taylor Gallery
15 Carlos Place
London
020 7409 3344
Mai-Thu Perret
September 18-October 18, 2008

Perret is known in both Europe and the U.S. for her ambitious multi-disciplinary practice encompassing sculpture, painting, video and installation. Perret has created a complex oeuvre which combines radical feminist politics with literary utopian texts, homemade crafts, and 20th century avant-garde aesthetics.

Since 1999, Perret’s practice has been dominated by her creation of an imaginary all female community called "The Crystal Frontier," located in the southwestern American desert. Fragmentary, diaristic and avowedly utopian, Perret has created a master narrative which proposes her output of sculptures, paintings, handcrafted ceramics, performances, films, texts, posters, mannequins, furniture and banners, as products created by the fictional community.

The overwhelming centrepiece of the exhibition is Little Planetary Harmony, 2006 — a dramatic, oversized aluminium clad teapot reminiscent of an element from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Perret has described it as looking like “a spaceship, a piece of outsider sculpture, or something built by freaks in the desert to advertise an organic diner.” Commissioned by the Renaissance Society in Chicago, and now enjoying its first showing in Europe, the teapot is actually a tiny art gallery, entered by visitors to view a display of several small abstract paintings on wood. The exhibition will also feature several new ceramics currently in production.

Born in Geneva in 1976 and educated at Cambridge University, Perret’s recent solo exhibitions have included: The Crystal Frontier at Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 2008; and Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum, 2007. In 2006 she was also the subject of a major solo exhibition, And every woman will be a walking synthesis of the universe, at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, and in 2005 at the Centre d’art Contemporain, Geneva. In 2007 she participated in the Lyon Biennale and in Eurocentric at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.