Les Trois Mouseketeers - Tout Pour Rien

PRESS RELEASE Dan Mitchell, Fabienne Audéoud, and John Russell become Les Trois Mouseketeers to compose a “six-handed” exhibition, a collaborative project devised and created by these three artists. All three started out in the 1990s, after studying art in London, they each developed a personal or collaborative practice at the margins of YBA (Young British Artists).[1] They participated in the development of parallel art forms to those of these artist-stars, oriented towards a critique of the art world of the day, presented through incongruous gestures, “bad art” creations with no virtues, shouting down hierarchies through awareness-raising provocation, with a lot of humour and light relief, detached from all commercial stakes. Now in their fifties, the three artists have kept in touch over the last twenty-five years, while John Russell cofounded BANK,[2] Dan Mitchell Poster Studio[3], and Fabienne Audéoud collaborated with John Russell on several performative projects from the early 2000s. Up until today, a shared energy has sustained their respective and collaborative practice: each of them uses language as a material – whether it is performed in a corporeal or auditive manner; articulated as painting, sculpture, or through slogans imitating the advertising-media machine; raising nonsense and the grotesque to the status of principles – in order to lay bare the common inversion of logics and the normalising of the absurd.