EXPOSITION : JOURS OUVRABLES DE LAIDA LERTXUNDI

About

The contemporary art centre is hosting an exhibition dedicated to Laida Lertxundi, whose work blends structural cinema, conceptual art and embodied feminist perspectives, often drawing on collective dynamics and personal experiences such as motherhood. Come and discover her art!

Laida Lertxundi is an artist and filmmaker of Basque origin who lived and worked in Los Angeles for 16 years. She is now a lecturer at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and lives and works in Paris.

Laida Lertxundi’s artistic approach, characterised by a meticulous engagement with the moving image and, more recently, drawing, develops an explicit language based on an exploration that combines conceptual rigour and sensuality. Her films thus draw parallels between landscape and the body as an experience.

Her collaborative practice features improvised gestures and spontaneous collective activities, and engages with the landscape both as an artistic tradition and as a distinct set of perspectives linked to the human condition. The creation of this repertoire of images opens up a cinematic dimension in which visual elements serve to activate collective memories, or even a shared artistic unconscious. Her commitment to the simplicity of gestures echoes what we are striving to achieve at the art centre: to forge links between contemporary art and care. Highly attuned to these evolving ideas, Laida Lertxundi’s methods focus on creating a resolutely intuitive visual aesthetic. She reveals artistic rigour and a profound sense of otherness.

Welcoming Laida Lertxundi to the contemporary art centre means taking the time to revisit our relationship with cinema, which is so central to the centre’s programme. This, the artist’s first exhibition in France, prioritises a form of engagement through an aesthetic approach rooted in encounter and gentleness.

Laida Lertxundi enables us to envisage a gradual and collaborative process through the implementation of a set of ideas and tools designed to support her research and creative practice in France. The contemporary art centre, situated in the Central Pyrenees, is thus firmly establishing its work at the very heart of the creative process.

As a filmmaker and visual artist, she develops an experimental practice that moves away from traditional narrative forms to prioritise process, materiality and sensory experience. Rooted in Californian landscapes and the Californian imagination, her work blends structural cinema, conceptual art and embodied feminist perspectives, often drawing on collective dynamics and personal experiences such as motherhood. Her films and installations explore the relationships between the body, language, sound and image through mechanisms of translation and transformation.

With the support of the PICE programme of Acción Cultural Española, AC/E.

Curated by Valérie Mazouin

Opening on Friday 3 July 2026 at 7.00 pm

The opening will be preceded at 6.00 pm by a guided tour in the presence of the artist, followed by a meal open to all (Price: €5)