Mythologies personnelles - L'art contemporain et l'intime

Its author, Isabelle de Maison Rouge, is an art historian. The title echoes the concept of ‘individual mythologies’, coined in 1972 by the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann for Documenta 5 in Kassel. The book focuses on contemporary artists who build their work around their personal history, memory, and obsessions. These ‘personal mythologies’ are described as new galleries of underground self-portraits. They are explored through video, photography, and performance, featuring artists such as Annette Messager and Jean-Pierre Raynaud. The author adopts a tone that is committed yet always restrained, informed by an open-ended questioning of the artists' own words. The book has since become a reference work, cited in numerous studies on contemporary art and the intimate.

My work is discussed in the chapter Fictions d'artistes [Artist Fictions], ‘Between fable and reality’, alongside Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, Vanessa Beecroft, Alice Anderson, and Matthew Barney, pp. 71-92.