Exhibitions

Opening: Friday 24 April at 6pm
Curator: Helene Audiffren

Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art is dedicating a major exhibition to artists Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille from April 25 to October 11, 2026. Since meeting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and beginning their collaborative work in the early 2000s, the painter duo has been exploring the infinite possibilities of their medium of choice: painting.

Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille draw on all iconographic registers, from landscape to portraiture and still life, moving between abstraction, figuration, op art, 3D painting, and more. Often covered by superimposed layers or interrupted by various patterns, scratches, or splashes, the paintings deal with the manipulation, reuse, and disappearance of images. The subjects are drawn as much from the history of art as from cinema, the internet, and magazines, multiplying the possibilities and their interpretations to varying degrees.

A series of somewhat mawkish portraits of couples draws on old post-war advertisements from a white patriarchal imagery, sprinkled with pictorial incongruities. The aim is to question, with a dose of irony, the dominant culture and the boundary between good and bad taste.

They can bring together in the same space an abstract painting with small paintings of flowers, large landscapes, portraits, and large black flowers cut out of wood and charred. Playing with images, materials, and techniques, the artists sometimes break free from the canvas. Shape paintings, cut-out and painted panels installed in the space, allow them to extend the exhibition space, abolishing the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They also present smears, sheets on which they experiment with brushstrokes and colors, offset plates covered with pictorial material, clumps of pure color, and girls with hands dipped in paint. For them, it is not a question of style or subject matter, but a greater whole that transcends the issues of figuration and abstraction.

Taking an offbeat look at their practice, their medium, and their environment, Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille question the power of painting. Because painting feeds on itself and its long history, their work follows in the footsteps of a pictorial tradition. Heirs to the past, the two artists challenge the codes inherent in the medium and take pleasure in breaking with a certain established order, offering the viewer a new way of thinking about the world in a constantly changing society.

Ida Tursic, born in 1974 in Belgrade, Serbia. Wilfried Mille, born in 1974 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. They live and work in Mazamet (81). They were winners of the 11th Ricard Corporate Prize in 2009, nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2019, and winners of the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation Prize in 2020. They have been featured in several exhibitions in galleries, art centers, Fracs, and museums in France and abroad. They are represented by the Max Hetzler (Berlin, Paris, London), Alfonso Artiaco (Naples), and Pietro Sparta (Chagny) galleries. They have completed several public art commissions, such as the music room at Villa Laurens in Agde in 2015 and the ceiling of the municipal council chamber at the Capitole in Toulouse in 2025.

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