Mae Dessauvage at Tatjana Pieters

Artist: Mae Dessauvage

Exhibition title: So Glad to Have Found It

Venue: Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium

Date: June 8 – August 25, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tatjana Pieters

“So Glad to Have Found It” is Mae Dessauvage’s second solo exhibition at Tatjana Pieters. The works included in the show depict intimate scenes based on historic iconography and the artist’s transgender experiences. Included in this exhibition is a new series of shaped panel paintings, works on paper, as well as a new sculpture of her ongoing “Reliquary” series.

Looking to early renaissance painters such as Giotto and Piero Della Francesca, Dessauvage’s practice re-interprets the narrative relationship between figures and symbolic objects. The androgynous figures in her paintings exist in a state of ambiguity along with abstracted artifacts like pyxes, cloaks, mirrors, skulls, and daggers. In the past, such symbolic objects would serve as signifiers of saints. With timid expressions and hesitant gestures, the figures in her paintings are instead uncertain about these objects, reflecting our uncertain relationship to history.

The historical meaning in Dessauvage’s practice is often subverted to have personal, double readings. Her work “Revelation” depicts a figure investigating a skull across four scenes. Iconographically, the skull is a “memento mori’’—a reminder of death. For the artist, it is equally a reference to the gendered nature of the skeleton and to the practice of facial surgery amongst trans women. Similarly, in “Cloak,” the composition quotes Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel crucifixion where two bystanders argue over Christ’s cloak. Here, however, two nude hermaphroditic figures examine the garment. In this context, the scene speaks to clothing as a means of cloaking the otherness of the body. By representing a collective distance with history and imbuing it with a more intimate, diaristic quality, the works in this show toe the line between the universal and the personal.