Mai-Thu Perret is a Swiss artist. Her sculptures, paintings, ceramic works, performances, and texts exist at the intersection of contemporary culture, art historical critique, and visceral materiality. She explores (and generates) feminist narratives and counter-narratives that cast the role of the art object in new light, introducing utilitarian, symbolic, and even mystical possibilities in contexts that are often limited to formalist readings. In her encompassing vision, for instance, the development of modernism appears not only as a story about increasing abstraction, but as the outgrowth of biological and neurological patterns that have informed human expression throughout the globe for thousands of years. Perret’s work shows how bodies are always implicit subjects of artistic discourse, and how impulses for utopian transcendence (aesthetic, political, or otherwise) can always be traced back to the physicality of desire. Mai-Thu Perret has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2022); MAMCO Geneva (2019); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); Le Magasin, Grenoble, France (2012); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2006). In 2011 she took part in the 54th Venice Biennale.
