Muriel Pic

Freelance writer and researcher, German translator and artist Muriel Pic, PhD from EHESS and HDR from the University of Freiburg, writes in verse, prose, film and collage. Her work does not separate thought and poem, and her literary writing interacts with her philological work, seeking the place of documentary lyricism to circulate between science and the arts, imagination and knowledge. She has published some twenty works. Latest publications: Henri Michaux. The Mescaline Drawings, catalog for The Courtauld Gallery, with F. Leibovici and G. Ketty; Le dernier printemps de Rosa Luxemburg et autres poèmes dramatiques (ed. Le Bruit du temps).

During his last stay in Rome, art historian Aby Warburg opened a project entitled “Grisaille Mantegna. Summer 1929”. In it, he became fascinated by grisaille painting, which he saw as the expression of a contained pathos: the return of pagan antiquity to the Renaissance through gray, marble-like figures is a technically mastered haunting, indebted to the theological notion of adumbratio. During her residency at Villa Medici, Muriel Pic will follow Warburg’s shadow through his notes, which she has undertaken to translate, and which feed a narrative on the sensation of absent things and possession between asceticism and ecstasy.