A longing

Fanny Allié

March 6 - April 12

Opening Reception: March 6 from 6 to 8 pm

KALINER is delighted to present A Longing, a solo exhibition by mixed media artist Fanny Allié. The artist’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery features Allié’s textile landscapes and scenes that tell stories about ephemerality, memory, human interactions and attractions. 

The exhibition title, A Longing, refers to the strong feelings we hold toward one another, our surroundings, or certain memories that linger within us. Allié’s characters seem possessed by this longing that is explored throughout her textile and mixed-media based landscapes.

Made from discarded fabric - lost and overlooked elements of daily life - Allié creates artworks that are sequences of life stories. Her layered compositions offer tensions between the visible, yet undefined characters that are connected or attached by threads, holding or pulling one another. A Longing also alludes to an attachment for a time that is now lost, a time when these objects and materials held meaning, and were part of someone's everyday life and body. By choosing to focus on discarded remnants, and used materials, Allié creates a narrative – she is seeking to give some meaning to the mundane while revealing loose stories, gestures and connections embedded within the seemingly insignificant fragments of everyday life.

 In her works Yellow Bird and The Urn (2025), diverse elements that inhabit the surface appear to float on the mesh creating isolated micro-scenes. These scenes, though distinct, are connected, featuring details such as a dangling leg, a vase or urn with unknown contents, scattered rocks, two-headed abstract figures, a distorted body, and a praying figure.

By using both her own discarded materials and those of others to create the artworks, the artist examines the relationship between these forsaken objects and the body that once engaged with them. Allié refers to the body as the first place that contains us. Through this exploration, she reflects on the broader connection between the human form and its surroundings or environment. Giving voice to the human experiences and traces embedded within these materials, the artist elevates them as relics of ephemerality, memory, passage and loss. Her works also shed light on the environmental and societal consequences of a throwaway culture.

Muted in predominantly natural tones, yet holding a strong presence, the compositions in A Longing evoke a cinematic experience. These diverse figures bear the traces of the world we live in, drawing inspiration from the observation of the artist's daily cityscape surroundings as well as from dance, theater, and the discarded materials they are made of. Allié’s work, influenced and directed by refuse, offers tensions between the layered materials and the characters within the composition that strive to reconnect. These interwoven stories are born from deeply personal and broadly collective experiences, shared mythologies anchored in an urban environment.