THE ARTIST
Agnès Barré-Masurier
Was born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1951 .
started weaving in Ulster (County Cavan) during 1976.
met Jacques Plasse le Caisne, from l'Ecole de Paris ( Manessier,Bazaine, Le Moal, etc.) in 1978.
Many exhibitions and works made to order .
From Montréal to Japan passing through Ireland and of course France, the name of Agnès Barré-Masurier has for twenty years been synonymous with contemporary tapestry. The weaving loom holds no secrets for her, and yet ... she invents and reinvents her art ever more to enrich our cultural heritage. Born in Auvergne, Breton by adoption, Agnès Barré-Masurier has all her life placed her natural ability for drawing and then painting at the service of a single objective to become one day an artist-tapestry weaver. Very early on, she found she preferred the tapestry loom to the traditional high and low-warp techniques for the possibility it offers of creating movement whilst leaving the warp apparent.
Even if she particularly loves the Fauve or Nabi painters, never will she agree to let tapestry be but a pale copy of painting. It is to this wild and independent temperament that today we owe the rich collection of woven works by this tapestry weaver, who has now lived and worked in Normandy for the last five years.
When Agnès Barré-Masurier weaves her weft in front of the public or the television cameras, the movements seem so simple that we forget the diff iculty of her technique and see only the light that flows out of her works. A past master in the art of intertwining threads, a simple warp effect will evoke the roof of a Romanesque abbey, a change from linen to cotton will suggest the movement of a bird, a pick of wool will clearly be a reflection in the water.
The translator of her own inspiration, the tapestry- weaver improvises in total freedom from a model that is sometimes barely an outline. The bright, but subtle colours that she offers us remind us here and there of the old stones of a prestigious building and the linen, the wool or cotton play us a concert whose harmony, makes tapestry an art in its own right. A self-taught painter, a weaver by profession, a tapestry weaver by passion, Agnès Barré-Masurier is unstoppable when she talks of the sources of the inspiration that nourishes her work. Slightly irritated if she is asked how much time she will take making such and such a tapestry, she will reply with her wide smile that creation is not measured in terms of patience, but in those of love and joy.
- 1999 : Exhibition in Deauville, Galerie, place Morny.
- 2000 : Exhibition at the museum of textile art in Rochefort en Terre with the sculptor Ray Boterf.
CONTACT agnesb.masurier@wanadoo.fr
