Karina Bisch, head in the decor at the Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot

Trained at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Karina Bisch (born in 1974 in Paris, where she lives and works) has developed an artistic vocabulary using references to geometric art, fashion and dance, with a sensitivity to modernity.

For the spaces of the Fernand Léger National Museum, this internationally renowned artist has designed an immersive installation that brings together murals, paintings and textile creations.

Colorful and contrasting works that establish a dialogue with five little-known pieces by Léger that punctuate the exhibition. These include a drawing, a gouache, a ceramic, and a lithograph.

Like Léger, in Biot, Karina Bisch explores the potential of decorative motifs as ornament and as an autonomous language, capable of generating meaning and reshaping space.

From the very beginning of the exhibition, a monumental face calls out: isn't every exhibition a self-portrait? On the scale of architecture, La Tête dans le décor , the work that gave the exhibition its title, summons a visual language that reinvests the legacy of the avant-garde. The artist appears in makeup, her face divided into vivid flat tints and surrounded by floating pictograms.

Walls invaded by stylized patterns

What immediately strikes the visitor is the way the paint invades the 6-meter-high wall, with a total gesture, transforming it into a blackboard where shapes float. Or into tattooed skin, depending on your point of view. Graphic repertoires and stylized motifs (clouds, leaves, butterflies) appear, as if extracted from a setting or an ancient alphabet. The wall becomes an enveloping field, the gaze a movement. Dizzying, hypnotic.

With Les Fleurs Diagonales , Karina Bisch, who constantly recycles her own work and who has taken forms from Léger, questions the very structure of the composition by shifting the classic, orthogonal grid towards an unstable diagonal.

The patterns, inspired by decorative arts and traditional textiles, are caught in a web where balance and instability coexist. The bright colors are contrasted by the black background. Farbenfröh means "colorful" in German.

This mechanical tapestry, a patchwork of source images and self-quotes presented a little further on, constitutes a woven retrospective of Karina Bisch's work. A work of memory, which notably evokes the Harlequin costume.

With Abidjan , we think we recognize an African mask with primary colors and monumental geometric shapes. But this painting derails, as if haunted by the weight of colonial history, like a cracked memorial to Karina Bisch's Ivorian childhood.

A vast achievement, Abidjan pays homage to the murals of the 1950s while simultaneously distancing them. The painting, shattered into a kaleidoscope of shapes, echoes the motif of the ceiling of a grand hotel in Abidjan, where European avant-garde movements intersect with references to so-called "primitive" arts.

Blurring of distinction between art and life

With Three Costumes for Fernand Léger (a painter's blouse and jumpsuit, as well as a dress with pockets, each accessorized with Niçois hats dating from 1960), Karina Bisch replays a key principle of pictorial modernity: the indistinction between art and life.

Finally, with Couverture en patchwork , Karina Bisch herself gives us this conclusion: "When I began working on my monograph She Paints , I was inspired by this book dedicated to Fernand Léger – Le goût de notre temps, Skira, 1962 – which was in my library. As if to inscribe my work in the glorious male genealogy which makes up the bulk of this collection, I chose to keep its almost square format (18 × 17cm). Since the dust jacket of the copy of Fernand Léger in my possession was missing, I took the opportunity to design a new one [...] This is how, at the end of the story, the book becomes a painting."