The French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici is pleased to present this autumn the exhibition Like a dancer dog that pays tribute to the work done for almost 30 years by the artist and former Villa Medici scholar Natacha Lesueur (promotion 2002-2003).

Natacha Lesueur's work is essentially photographic. His artistic interests are articulated around the body, appearance, appearance and the intimate relationship between the body and its interiority. Through a series of images constructed like paintings, the body is subjected to different treatments that detect constriction, staging and the mask at the same time.

Curated by Christian Bernard, the exhibition develops in the form of a visual and thematic narrative that brings together more than 80 works by the artist, both historical and unpublished, offering an intimate look at his work around the image and its plastic and political intentions.

The ironic dimension of the title borrowed from Virginia Woolf's book A room of one's own fully expresses her awareness as a woman artist and sets the tone for an exhibition where the incongruous and the extravagant are treated with the utmost seriousness.

From the first historical works (1993-1998), to the very recent series of fairies-brides (Les humeurs des fées, 2020-21), passing through the works dedicated to the Brazilian actress Carmen Miranda, legendary figure of Hollywood cinema of the 40s, representations of the feminine inhabit the exhibition, often disturbing, always ambiguous. Through interventions on distinctive identity markers, hair and clothing envelopes, vehicles and symbols of the masquerades of femininity, through the exploration of attributed roles and normative models - bride, mother, princess, actress, dancer, etc. - through the subversion of the impositions on beauty, youth or thinness, Natacha Lesueur tries to reveal, not without humor, the manifestations of the expression of a social and cultural constraint. Suffocating hairstyles, accessorized hair, XXL make-up and food hairpieces are all recurring enigmas in the narrative-paintings exhibited at Villa Medici.