Cover image: Fabienne Lasserre, Eye-Touch, 2020.

The Athenaeum, the University of Georgia’s downtown contemporary art space, was awarded a $60,000 Fall 2022 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support the exhibition Fabienne Lasserre: Listeners, marking the gallery’s first time receiving this prestigious award. Premiering in January of 2024, the exhibition will feature a series of sculpture/painting hybrid works by the Canadian-born, New York-based artist Fabienne Lasserre. To accompany the exhibition, the Athenaeum is commissioning a new work by modern dance choreographer Beth Gill that involves a series of dancers moving in and around the sculptures, activating the installation through the dancers’ repetitive movements.

For the Fall 2022 grant cycle, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts will grant 48 organizations over $4 million to support artists and nourish creativity through exhibitions, residencies, commissions, publications, convenings, and curatorial research.

“The Foundation is pleased to support exhibitions that give artists opportunities to generate new work and expand their creative practices,” asserts Rachel Bers, Program Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The Athenaeum’s presentation of Fabienne Lasserre’s exhibition will expose the artist to new audiences and interlocutors, and enable her to experiment with interactivity and performance in new ways.”

“With support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Athenaeum is thrilled to host a major solo exhibition of artist Fabienne Lasserre,” says the Athenaeum’s Director, Katie Geha. “This generous funding will allow for new and radical collaborations, and we are beyond excited to invite choreographer Beth Gill and her company to perform at the Athenaeum in the spring of 2024.”

Fabienne Lasserre, Oh.Ah., 2021. Linen, steel, transparent vinyl, corrugated plastic, extruded polystyrene foam, acrylic polymer, acrylic and enamel paint. 61 x 45 x 4.5 in. Photo courtesy of Alan Wiener, Polite Photographic Services.

More About the Exhibition

Fabienne Lasserre: Listeners will consist of a series of painting/sculpture hybrids that combine clear vinyl spray-painted in translucent gradients of color with fabric, solidified foam, stucco, and paint. The work recalls modernist abstraction while remaining firmly contemporary in its insistence on the presence of the viewer and her body’s relation to objects in space. Installed as a group, Lassere’s pieces — several of which are suspended from the ceiling— obstruct, frame and direct vision, passage and movement; they inherently imply the presence and engagement of bodies: people who look through, walk around, and peer over. The installation will act as a stage for a series of curated performances. Significantly, the Athenaeum will commission a new work by Beth Gill, an accomplished choreographer who attends to themes of alienation, erasure and power through the lens of abstraction. Thus, the connection between the activity of the body and the inert sculptures, a connection fundamental to Lasserre’s practice, will be emphasized through the movement of the dancers. The exhibition is curated by Athenaeum Director Dr. Katie Geha.

Fabienne Lasserre, Appear, 2020. Linen, steel, transparent vinyl, acrylic polymer, acrylic, urethane and enamel paint. 44 x 46 x ½ in. Photo courtesy of Alan Wiener, Polite Photographic Services.

More About the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given over $260 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.

About the Athenaeum 

The Athenaeum is a non-collecting contemporary art gallery affiliated with the University of Georgia and the Lamar Dodd School of Art. We are an experimental educational resource for students at the University of Georgia as well as for the Athens community at large. The gallery comprises some five thousand square feet. We house an art gallery, a space for workshops, lectures, and classes as well as a Reading Room to peruse texts and listen to records that connect with the exhibitions in the gallery. We produce exhibitions and programming that examine the cultural and social contexts around us, challenge contemporary perceptions of art making to provide a framework for intellectual and creative inquiry. Encouraging multi-faceted, cross-disciplinary conversation, the Athenaeum is a site for the exchange of ideas about art and the many issues on which it touches.