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ÉPIGRAPHE

Marie-France Brière

Curator: Jean-Michel Quirion

Courtesy of the artist

September 25 – October 17 2026
Thu–Sun 3–7 pm and p.app.
Kolonie Wedding Weekend:
FR 25.10 7–10 pm, SA 26 & SUN 27.10 3–7 pm

It took nearly forty years for these marble fragments to complete part of their journey in reverse. In the 1980s, Montreal artist Marie-France Brière stayed in Pietrasanta, a medieval town in Tuscany that has for centuries been regarded as an artistic capital, particularly for bronze casting and marble working. Nearby, the Carrara quarries, exploited since Roman times, cut into the mountain from which the eponymous marble is extracted. During her time in Italy, Brière refined her technical skills and learned to sculpt—as one learns to read and write—this material whose use stretches back thousands of years. She tested its resistance while discovering its potential. She returned to Montreal, Quebec, with heavy blocks of marble that would remain part of the daily life of her studio for many years. Extracted from an Italian mountain, transported to our continent, preserved, carved, worked, and reworked: some of these fragments are now making their way back to Europe. In Berlin, Germany, Epigraph thus inscribes a new stratum in their geological and geographical history.

The exhibition title immediately invokes writing. An epigraph refers both to an inscription engraved into matter and to the few words placed at the threshold of a text to inflect its reading. This dual meaning runs through Marie-France Brière’s practice. For more than four decades, the artist has approached stone as a material to be read as much as transformed. Its veins, fractures, density, and irregularities already constitute a language. Sculpting, then, is neither about subjugating the stone nor imposing a form upon it. Rather, the gesture consists in composing with what it carries within it, sometimes for millions of years. (…)

Presenting these works in Berlin sets another journey in motion. Marie-France Brière’s return to the European continent, with a material that had itself been extracted from there several decades earlier, seems to bring the spatiotemporal journey full circle. Yet nothing returns exactly to its point of departure. Between Carrara, Montreal, and Berlin, the stone has accumulated gestures, distances, durations, and histories.

Epigraph inhabits this interval. To read matter as one follows its strata. To write with what it reveals and retains. Perhaps this, too, is what it means to resist. Immemorial language. Fragments in the making.

Marie-France Brière has been pursuing a sculptural practice for many years. Her recent work draws on technical and conceptual approaches related to plasticity—the malleable quality that allows matter to undergo continuous transformation through modeling and shifts in configuration under the action of various forces. Her most recent exhibitions include Champ de contraintes at Centre CLARK in Montreal (2024) and Reliefs éphémères at the Fondation Grantham in Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham (2025).

Jean-Michel Quirion holds a Master’s degree in Museum Studies from the Université du Québec en Outaouais. He has directed the artist-run centre AXENÉO7 (2019–2022) and was Co-General Manager, Programming, at Centre CLARK (2022–2025) in Montreal. He writes for magazines including Esse and Vie des arts. His curatorial projects have been presented at AXENÉO7, Carleton University Art Gallery, and ROSALUX in Berlin. He is currently Co-Director and Editorial Manager of Vie des arts magazine.

With the support of the Québec Government Office in German