gb agency

June 23th – September 29th, 2024

From 2001 to 2024, gb agency was an exhibition space, a private gallery, an inspiration for many, a breath. All at once, just like the many roles played by its founders, art historians and curators Nathalie Boutin and Solène Guillier, who have turned their lives into an adventure to be invented with artists, and to be shared.

With the polyphony of forms, ideas and voices it conjures up, The Role of a Lifetime is an extension of what gb agency’s programme has always sought to develop: an artistic and political commitment in the face of the contingencies, contradictions, and upheavals of contemporary society. This exhibition is also the witness of a precious and rare conversation that has characterised the work of the gallery over the years, between people bound by mutual respect and a lasting relationship, around the same belief in art in a world of obstacles. It is a dialogue in action that has evolved, and will no doubt continue to evolve, around a desire, or even a demand: how can we join forces with artists in thinking, acting, gesturing and imagining, and together make sensitive, critical shifts in relation to our time?

Echoing several of the artworks gathered here that are calling for breath, gb agency was a place where you could take a deeper breath, where you could discover artists from different generations and geographies through unusual encounters and necessary reinterpretations, where the forms of the exhibition were explored and experimented with, where it was possible to doubt collectively for the sake of greater wonder.

Set in a new perspective, The Role of a Lifetime presents works each bearing witness, in their own way, to this 23-year odyssey – by definition a long journey filled with twists and turns and extraordinary events – and once again attests to the pioneering vision of a structure turned towards those who seek, invent, and create. They are works that are capable of conjugating in the past as in the future, in the singular as in the plural, to better speak to us of today, of some of our asphyxiations, and perhaps more than anything else, of a more breathable tomorrow.
Élodie Royer