![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/dot.png\")
\n Beatrice Loayza<\/p>\n
\t Mimosa Echard \t
\n Beatrice Loayza<\/p>\n
A material girl in a material world: hyperfeminine stylings commingle with industrial structures and materials in the artist\u2019s exhibition.<\/p>\n
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Mimosa Echard: Facial, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Amant. Photo: New Document.<\/p>\n
Mimosa Echard: Facial, Amant, 315 Maujer Street, Brooklyn,
through February 15, 2026<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n
In his sprawling, unfinished tome about proto\u2013shopping malls in nineteenth-century Paris, The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin saw the ambulatory figure of the fl\u00e2neur as a vision of the future: a perspective in perpetual flux; a psyche cut with shard-like images of the surrounding city, its industrial logic of glass, iron, and steel and its glittering cacophony of commodities. Arguably, in our present world of endless screens, we are all fl\u00e2neurs, drifting through a phantasmagoria of consumer culture\u2014of \u201cdream images that rise into the waking world.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Mimosa Echard: Facial, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Amant. Photo: New Document.<\/p>\n
A self-proclaimed fl\u00e2neuse herself, the Paris-based artist Mimosa Echard has fashioned Facial\u2014her first solo show in the US\u2014after fragmented urban experience. From a distance, Facial, which is currently on view at Amant, might resemble a series of sculptural paintings and photographs. But its parts comprise a single installation meant to evoke a hallucinatory trip around New York City, which Echard called a kind of \u201csexy jail\u201d in an interview with Cultured. The aesthetic treatment brought to mind by the title underscores the show\u2019s investment in facades; in the work of creating impressions in a figurative sense. The word\u2019s usage in porn\u2014in which a performer\u2019s face is a canvas for cum\u2014also hints at Echard\u2019s enchantment with trashier expressions of femininity: the overly contoured, bimbo-ey sort that exists in male fantasy as opposed to real life. Stepping into the gallery space, you\u2019ll immediately spot two overlapping 4×6 photo prints taped to the wall, the image on the bottom covering half of the one above. What we see is a mascara-enhanced eye\u2014the airbrushed, tastelessly aspirational kind used for beauty-salon storefronts\u2014peeking over a set of brick steps covered in leaves and illuminated with tawdry flash.<\/p>\n
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Mimosa Echard, photograph taken on Grand Street, Brooklyn, 2025. Courtesy the artist.<\/p>\n
Other similarly eerie manifestations of this glam single-eyed gaze are scattered throughout the rooms like yassified minions of panopticonic power. They stare at us, alluring and menacing, from isolated photographs or as individual elements in richly layered collages, thick accretions of conventional and found materials with an occlusive veneer. As encapsulated by this sultry surveyor, girlish stylings\u2014earrings, wrapping paper covered in red hearts, leopard print\u2014mesh with the installation\u2019s authoritarian streak. Evocative of the city\u2019s grid system and riffing off what Edith Wharton called \u201crectangular New York[\u2019s] . . . deadly uniformity of mean ugliness,\u201d the exhibition abounds in latticed patterns and rectilinear formations: a powder-coated drain grate, a short video clip of ant-like cars filtering on and off the Brooklyn Bridge. One photograph shows the topless torsos of several mannequins, their heads obscured by a half-closed rolling shutter. Appearances to the contrary, it\u2019s not really a commentary on the tyranny of female beauty standards\u2014the show is ultimately too wry to feel seriously under the thumb of such pressures; its insights, instead, operate through affective registers; we glean moods and feelings from the material world in the mode of the fl\u00e2neur\u2019s transient passages.<\/p>\n
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Mimosa Echard: Facial, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Amant. Photo: New Document.<\/p>\n
In 2022, Echard won the Marcel Duchamp prize for her multimedia installation made that year, Escape more, in which liquid flows over a glass wall through which one can make out the blurry pink outlines of what might be a bedroom or studio. This play with transparency and deceptive surfaces is fundamental to Echard\u2019s practice; the artist regularly employs thick layers of disparate substances to create a porous boundary between organic and synthetic objects, masculine- and feminine-coded imagery. Several Plexiglas works in Facial that appear like marbled expanses of bubblegum-pink and gold take on an epidermal density up close. Swirls of dried depilatory wax commingle with oxidized blotches, while crinkly wrapping paper or a bumpy layer of brick wallpaper stickers make up the background. As on the streets of Gotham, urine is splashed throughout, though it\u2019s uncertain where exactly these golden showers have fallen. This riot of textures resembles bacterial cultures suspended in the gooey membrane of a petri dish.<\/p>\n
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Mimosa Echard, untitled, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Amant.<\/p>\n
Raised in a hippie commune in the south of France\u2014a community she documented in her 2016 film The People through a psychedelic mishmash of MiniDV camera footage\u2014Echard draws inspiration from plants and the seemingly alien reproductive systems found in nature. Hearkening back to this fascination, the starting point for Facial is the gingko tree, a ubiquitous sight in the city that\u2019s revealed to have strange, ghostly resonances with what Echard views as Gotham\u2019s penal architecture. In Echard\u2019s hands, the noble ginkgo, which has weathered not only Hiroshima but multiple ice ages, recalls, for instance, the stark, windowless monolith at 33 Thomas Street\u2014the only building in New York designed to withstand a nuclear bomb. Gingko eggs, those stinky orange berries that litter the sidewalks, are embedded throughout the installation, while the acid yellow-green of the tree\u2019s fallen leaves is used to temper the carceral severity of some pieces\u2014for instance, a twenty-foot-tall painting of jade grid-like squares overlaying what looks like smashed concrete, or perhaps cracked tree bark.<\/p>\n
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Mimosa Echard: Facial, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Amant. Photo: New Document. Pictured, far left: Lady\u2019s Glove (NYC), 2025.<\/p>\n
Opposite this behemoth is a canvas a tenth of the size decked out in a curtain of glass beads, anti-radiation fabric, and sundry seductive eyes. Like flatter versions of Joseph Cornell\u2019s memory boxes, Echard\u2019s tableaux are works of surrealist compression in which the history, plastic dreams, and paranoid nightmares of a fluttering cityscape are metabolized to create unique organisms. In a looping video at the end of the show, Times Square is captured in extreme close-up to look almost like a flicker film, its Jumbotron advertisements whittled down to bouncing digital grains.<\/p>\n
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Mimosa Echard, Tide, 2025 (still). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel.<\/p>\n
Despite the show\u2019s metropolitan breadth, Echard also folds herself into her practice, aligning its urban rover\u2019s point-of-view with that of her own. Escape more, after all, invites (though ultimately obstructs) the voyeur\u2019s gaze into her personal territory; and Echard\u2019s monograph Lies (2025) is in part a collage of loosely associated images from her ramshackle adolescence in the country and the iconography of \u201990s and 2000s commercial culture\u2014especially the aesthetics of Y2K hyperfemininity\u2014that inevitably filtered through her consciousness during those impressionable early years. (Echard was born in 1986.) In Facial, there is a photograph of a woman, perhaps in East Williamsburg, with her back turned away from the camera as she leans over a table and assembles a piece. One of her legs is marked by a slash of glittery depilatory wax and her ass, bare save for a striped thong, is at the center of the frame. Across the room is a massive metal phone charm, Lady\u2019s Glove (NYC) (2025), whose name might refer to the accessories of high-society women or the purple, trumpet-shaped flower. Both conjure Echard: as urbane artist; leaky, libidinal human woman; and purveyor of kitsch drawn from the recesses of her own girlhood.<\/p>\n