Rooted in her practice as a printmaker, Pétrin creates immersive, highly graphic environments, often producing hundreds of individual prints for a single installation. For her exhibition at grunt gallery, the artist will be working to create a unique installation that acknowledges the architecture of the gallery space.

Embedded in Pétrin’s maximal (as opposed to minimal) practice is a graphic insistence of the time and labour involved in the creation of her room-encompassing collages. Belying digital technologies capable of spawning image after image ad infinitum, Pétrin’s reproductions are executed, cut and collaged by hand. The artist’s recent exploration of quilting forms (in her exhibition Get rid of the fabric softener at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran) establishes a more direct connection to the issue of gendered labour and the creation of a common “we” in the execution of communally determined, intergenerational aesthetic forms. Referencing textile-inspired graphics as a starting point, You won’t solve the problem with an air freshener, considers the root of shared identity via pattern reproduction, an emphatic counterpoint to the coolness invoked by endlessly (and one often assumes carelessly) proliferated digital imagery.