The paintings of Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille represent a critical reading of the production processes of contemporary visual culture and the images shaped by the media. The artists re-create anonymous visual material taken from the internet, magazines, and cinema within traditional painting practices, questioning the meanings carried by these images. These visuals offer not only an individual viewing experience but also a way of thinking about the large-scale circulation of visual culture. From a postmodern perspective, Tursic and Mille engage in a fictional structural inquiry into the continuous reproduction and imitation of images, raising questions about the originality and authenticity of these visuals. They use the process of “devaluation” of visual material in contemporary terms as a formal tool to enrich the boundaries of painting.
While questioning the existence of images, the artists develop various visual strategies. Techniques such as abstraction, covering, intervention, and distortion reveal the disappearing or transforming nature of images on the surface of the painting. Through these methods, they both fragment visual meaning and blur the boundaries between the historical and cultural contexts of images. The works of Tursic and Mille show how artistic language intersects with the visual consumption practices of contemporary culture, reminding the viewer of the potential to produce new meanings by deviating from the original context of the images.
Ida Tursic was born in 1974 in Belgrade, Serbia and Wilfried Mille was born in 1974 in Boulogne-sur-mer, France. Since their meeting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and the beginning of their work as an artist duo in 2000, Tursic and Mille dwell on images which they transmute in painting.
The artist duo has had solo and group exhibitions in many institutions over the years including Centre Pompidou (France), Monnaie de Paris (France), Espace d’art contemporain (France), Kunst in Weidingen (Germany), Fondation d’enterprise Ricard (France), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dôle (France), Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon (France), Musée de l’abbaye Sainte-Croix (France), MuMo (le Musée Mobile) (France), Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna (Italy), Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (France) and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (France).
Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille live and work in Mazamet, France.