TURSIC & MILLE

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Selected Works

Study in Blue, 2022

oil on canvas
190 x 230 cm.; 74 3/4 x 90 1/2 in.
Photo: def image

‘It is a metalanguage and once again, there is the question of objecthood. Where is the object? What is it? […] There was this desire, especially in the Studies for a Mound, to abstract "the thing". As a result, the figurative “thing" becomes abstract, emptied of meaning. There is always this conflict in painting, when you see an image. Is the image itself being represented? What is the totality of the thing?’

Tursic & Mille, ‘Interview: Tursic & Mille’, filmed on the occasion of their solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2022

The Blue One, 2022

oil on wood
38 x 29.5 x 6 cm.; 15 x 11 5/8 x 2 3/8 in.
Photo: def image

‘The young woman observes, half disgusted and half perplexed, the thick layer of blue paint that stains her fingers. She has dirtied them on purpose, dipping them in the thick puddle of the same colour that lies on the table in front of her. The painting could serve as a portrait of any painter at work, faced with their demon, these pigments diluted in oil, uncontrollable, sticking to their fingers, body and soul, heady and rebellious to the brushstrokes that claim to have all the power over them. And yet. The paint does what it wants: it comes out of nowhere, spoiling the image as much as it traces it’. 

Judicaël Lavrador, ‘Exposition: Tursic & Mille, la peinture à la sauce pigmentée’, in Libération, 14 March 2022

Hallali Oh la la, 2022

oil on canvas, in artist’s frame, in two parts
overall: 236 x 405 x 7 cm.; 92 7/8 x 159 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.
each: 236 x 196 x 7 cm.; 92 7/8 x 77 1/8 x 2 3/4 in.
Photo: def image

Running figure with reddish hair escaping a blue grass stalk + red flower, 2020

oil on cut wood
276.5 x 175 x 28.2 cm.; 108 7/8 x 68 7/8 x 11 1/8 in.
Photo: def image

The Blue Landscape, 2019

oil on wood panel in oak frame, in three parts
overall: 246.3 x 373.7 x 5.5 cm.; 97 x 147 1/8 x 2 1/8 in.
Photo: def image

Abstract painting with low horizon, 2019

oil on studio wall wood panel, Douglas frame, in two panels
178 x 177 x 5 cm.; 70 1/8 x 69 3/4 x 2 in.
Photo: Charles Duprat

‘Playing with images and materials, the duo uses many materials and sometimes breaks free from the canvas. Thus, the Shape paintings, […] allow them to extend the exhibition space by abolishing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, between figuration and abstraction, between good taste and bad taste.’

S. Bertrand, Tursic & Mille. The Postponed Show. Press Release, Havre: Le Portique, 2021

Uncertainty For The Future Under A Saucepan Red Moon, 2014–2019

oil on canvas
200.3 x 150.1 cm.; 78 7/8 x 59 1/8 in.
Photo: def image

Landscape (after Jheronimus Bosch St. Anthony's temptation), 2018

oil on canvas
300 x 200 cm.; 118 1/8 x 78 3/4 in.

Untitled, 2018

oil on aluminium
200 x 300 cm.; 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in.

Eaten by the mouse still life, 2018

oil on canvas
250 x 200 cm.; 98 3/8 x 78 3/4 in.

Le grand incendie, 2017

oil on canvas
230 x 600 cm.; 90 1/2 x 236 1/4 in.
Photo: Rebecca Fanuele

LA County Museum on Fire, 2017

UV ink and oil on canvas
320 x 230 cm.; 126 x 90 1/2 in.
Photo: Rebecca Fanuele

Bianco Bichon, 2017

oil on shaped wood panel
165 x 124 x 20 cm.; 65 x 48 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.
Collection: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Photo: Rebecca Fanuele

Installation view: Paintings, Stiftung zur Förderung zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen, Weidingen, 2017

Raw Bettie; La Bettie au Bichon; Bettie in Pink; Flesh Bettie; Doubtful Bettie; Bettie and the Duck; Blue Bettie; Bettie and sepia and black and white (from left to right, first to second row)
2017
oil on canvas
each painting: 220 x 165 cm.; 86 5/8 x 65 in.
Photo: def image

The present eights paintings are based on images of the American pin-up girl Bettie Page. Tursic and Mille used for this series an image of her posing topless in a living room-like setting.

The works are characteristic examples of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille's engagement with today's forms of image representation. The artists find their anonymous pictorial material in magazines and the enormous data pool of the internet. They select pornographic images, film scenes of burning houses, landscapes as well as mere abstract elements as the basis, which is then transformed into the traditional domain of painting.

Alienated by overlapping layers of paint as well as parts that seem to be cut out of the underlying picture, the Bettie paintings deal with the manipulation, re-utilisation and disappearance of images, especially in the current age of endless visual data replication.

Walter Benjamin, 2016

oil on screen and aluminium
260 x 230 cm.; 102 3/8 x 90 1/2 in.

‘The artists confront technology head-on in a painting of Walter Benjamin based on his passport photo. Benjamin, the famed German philosopher, discussed the decline of the “aura” of the singular artwork in the face of mechanically reproduced images. Tursic and Mille’s painting both rejects and accepts this notion of aura. After all, the source image has been transformed into pixels in the digital ether, then enshrined in paint by Tursic and Mille as a new, unique work.’

B. Lazer, ‘Painting in the Age of Google Images with Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille’, Artsy, 9 June 2016 

ABS020, 2015

UV ink and oil on canvas
250 x 200 cm.; 98 3/8 x 78 3/4 in.
Photo: def image

‘Tursic and Mille enlarged images they took of used palette paper and then painted with oils on the prints’ surfaces to play perceptual tricks, emphasizing oppositions between true and false, original and reproduction.’

E. Viola, ‘Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille’, Artforum, October 2015

White silver - Toile de Jouy, 2014

oil, silver and computer print on canvas
200 x 250 cm.; 78 3/4 x 98 3/8 in.

Little white holes, 2013

oil on wood
26 x 33 cm.; 10 1/4 x 13 in.

Le Canard inquiétant, 2013

oil and silver on canvas
200 x 300 x 5 cm.; 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 x 2 in.

‘The duck figure originates from several sources, most notably Asger Jorn’s 1959 painting Le canard inquiétant (The disquieting duckling), a title Tursic & Mille adopted for a 2013 “silver” depiction of several beauty pageant contestants whose heads are covered by sacks (or KKK hoods, it is hard to tell) while one yellow duck sticks out on the waist of one of them near the middle of the picture.’

N. Roussel, ‘What I paint is very ordinary’, Tursic & Mille, Berlin: Holzwarth Publications, 2019, p. 203

La comète, 2013

oil on wood
40 x 50 cm.; 15 3/4 x 19 3/4 in.

The Windmill, 2012

oil and silver on canvas
200 x 250 cm.; 78 3/4 x 98 3/8 in.

‘Every technique is there, every possible touch, every style, sometimes on one and the same canvas, every conceivable manner of painting, and every angle. Every genre, too: portrait, landscape, abstraction, geometric shapes, optical experiments. These artists' canvases summon up the history of painting, but in a discreet way, the whole past of painting in all its forms, and they bring it into our present, the present of the Internet, where they find their image market, the market of film, advertising, and fashion magazines.’

V. Vuillaume, ‘Another Girl’, in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille: Decade, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, p. 43

Silver Girl, 2010

oil and silver on canvas
200 x 300 cm.; 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in.

‘In its patient construction, this art project seems to be wagering that each and every painting is an invention. Otherwise put, nothing will be repeated ad infinitum, and if the representations seem to be as one and form a continuous set, the headstrong eye will know how to observe the variation of techniques, the increasing complexity of procedures, their on-going experimentation, their abandonment and their resumption, in a nutshell a permanent laboratory-like work whose canvas is the place – and which, at times, leads to the total covering of a representation in colour by a layer of translucent grey (Silver Girl, 2010).’

E. Troncy, ‘This painting’, in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille: Decade, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, p. 35

Numéro p. 185, 2008

UV ink on canvas
250 x 200 cm.; 98 3/8 x 78 3/4 in.

‘These large abstract canvases reproduce the sheets of paper used by Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille to try out their colours as they actually make their figurative paintings; they are paintings involving chance and accident, which both summon up the great moments of abstract painting and also, in another chord, remind us that these paintings, which are so sure about their powers of seduction, are nothing more than assembled patches of colour, pure matter or paint, the spirit of which may run away after all.’

V. Vuillaume, ‘Another Girl’, in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille: Decade, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, p. 44

91 Interview May 1998, 2008

oil on canvas
250 x 200 cm.; 98 3/8 x 78 3/4 in.

‘The first Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille girl I saw was fair-haired, and lying in the grass. That month of May blonde had no name, she came from the May 1998 issue of the magazine Interview. As a rule, the Tursic-Mille girls are given the name of the magazine they are taken from. They are not subjects, they are images, just images. I first saw that fair-haired girl on a record sleeve, a first accidental, haphazard encounter. I immediately liked that rather vulgar blonde, looking at us all eyes, blue, needless to add, almost too blue, at once expressive and empty, disquieting. I do not know why I instantly liked that image, but I think it had to do with the fictious character of that blonde, she is so fake, she 'rings fake', the way we usually say 'rings true'. She is a fiction, a blonde of fiction, lovely as a lie, as a film image. It is the image of a blonde, and in a confused way knowing we are not quite sure what, we feel that this is an image based on another image. There is no use trying to make our way back to the source, to reality, it is too far away. This is what makes the image moving, its – her – fictional being, while, with the girl's gaze, it proclaims her presence. What troubles us is this impression of having already see this image, at once familiar and foreign, we have already seen it but not like this, not in painting.’

V. Vuillaume, ‘Another Girl, in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille: Decade, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, p. 43

2h13'01'' Le Sacrifice A. Tarkovski, 2007

oil on canvas
200 x 300 cm.; 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in.

Perhaps there is a possible link here between the painting of girls and the paintings of landscapes and houses on fire: desire being set aflame, all-consuming but forever being reborn. These particular paintings are paintings of catastrophe, disaster, the end of the world, and the endgame. From desire to disaster, this might be the trajectory which takes us from the girls of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille to their landscapes on fire. Desire leads to disaster, partly bound up with fiction but also with death and catastrophe. The fate of those who are in love with images is always tragic, desire always leads to disaster.’

V. Vuillaume, Another Girl’, in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille: Decade, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, p. 43

The Back of the Sign, 2007

oil and silver on canvas
200 x 300 cm.; 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in.

‘They also paint the B-side of Hollywood, both figuratively and literally, with this canvas showing us the famous letters in the Hollywood Hills, seen from behind, something smacking of David Lynch, and Mulholland Drive, the flipside of dream and décor, something which can turn into a nightmare. It is a dream and at the same time they are just fragile, well-worn letters, hardly recognizable, scarcely meaningful, a dream which can catch fire, as in this other canvas which sets fire to the Hollywood Hills. The dream and its end, the life and death of images, their power, their presence, and their disappearance in the offing. Thanks to their painting, they rekindle the old dream, based on its remains and ruins; they help us to once more like images, and they reconcile us with them. Our eyes seem weary, they are once again ready for the spectacle, with much jubilation and at the same time a certain melancholy, a celebration of late-comers, arriving at a time when all films have already been seen, paintings reproduced, styles tried out, and yet things are still going on, and we still might be able to believe in it all...’

V. Vuillaume, ‘Another Girl’, in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille: Decade, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, p. 44

Cumshot in blue, 2006

oil on canvas
200 x 300 cm.; 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in.

‘The brutality of the paintings of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille does not actually reside so much in their erotic, pornographic element as in their virtuoso and artisanal manufacture, which is also, incidentally, thoroughly erotic, where we are aware of the ballet involving the four hands and two bodies busily at work, painting, and patiently and ploddingly making the image. By once more making images, when we no longer need any, satisfied as we are with all the images and their fluid and instant circulation, and because it is these particular images Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille suffuse painting with a raison d'être that is all the more shocking because it runs counter to the day and age. In so doing, they move it forward in the only way that is, for the time being, possible: precisely by contrasting it with the triumphant imagery being produced (and disseminated) by other media.’

E. Troncy, ‘This painting’, in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille: Decade, Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2011, p. 36

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