Even the Phoenix is Scared to Die

Arthur Rosset (who also signes ANIDE) is a multidisciplinary artist from Lyon, currently living and working in Berlin and Paris. Exhibited in London, Berlin, Lyon and Megève, he is a passionate self-taught artist. In 2021, he founded “Le Théâtre de la Rêverie”, a multidisciplinary program that aims to explore themes that revolve around the imaginary. Inspired by nature, philosophy, music and semiotics, he explores the imagination by creating a dreamlike world, a reverie where we get lost in the meaning we want to give it. With his compositions and their intimate dimension, he returns to the essence of things, of one- self and of others. Through sensitive experiences, games of lines, shapes, colours and contradictions, he gradually digs into the layers of our imagination to offer us an enriched vision of our reality. Concerned with the links between elements and with creating new ones, all his work is a correspondence: between the abstract and the figurative, between different mediums, between the present and the future, between individuals, between art and life, between dream and reality, between our primal nature and the social injunction. In an age that has distanced us from nature and our own nature, he sees this research as a gate- way to a world that we have forgotten to see or that we may never have seen. Thus, through suggestion, he teaches us to pay attention to and trust our impressions, emotions, bodies and instincts. It is then up to us, as when he creates, to disregard any preconception in order to let our conscious and unconscious dialogue, in an instinctive and uncontrolled way, to interpret, feel, appropriate his work and finally let go. The poetry of the visible and the invisible, the sound and the visual, the still and the living, is then offered to us, in a free, sincere and plural form.

Roxy Ruby is an Australian artist, based in Berlin, who works predominantly in charcoal drawing. She is influenced by film stills, theatrical motifs, mise en scène, costume, archaeology, Greek mythology, fairy tales and other forms of storytelling to explore themes of the subconscious, dreams, identity and transcendence. These themes are articulated through both romantic, surreal, figurative compositions and detailed, layered scenes that depict the metamorphosis of figurative subject matter into abstract dreamscapes. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Monash University, Melbourne in 2009 and a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne in 2012. Following her studies, she worked for ten years as a Registrar in the Galleries and Museums sector in Melbourne. In 2021, she relocated to Berlin to focus on her visual arts practice.