The new solo exhibition at Galerie Miranda of works by Nancy Wilson-Pajic (b. 1941) draws upon the artist’s personal archives to present early and lesser-known works in order to highlight the breadth of enquiries and processes explored throughout her long career in France and internationally.

Particularly known today for her large-format photograms in cyanotype, notably of disembodied textiles - haute couture robes for Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen, Christian Lacroix; historical laceworks and stage costumes; but everyday objects - Nancy Wilson-Pajic first used photography in the 1960s to document her artworks - performances as well as ephemeral and in situ works. In the 1970s this developed into a practice of “performance” for the camera, often sequences of still images, but the artist also organized “absences”, or installations with her voice or image. Her exploration of sequential images became more cinematic and the texts longer, to the point of constructing sometimes very long parallel narratives in image and text.

From the 1980s Nancy Wilson-Pajic questioned the ways in which the photographic image is compelling, asking what makes a photograph art, and exploring the mechanisms with which photographs, especially when combined with text, become efficient vectors of commercial and political messaging. These interrogations led her to explore alternative printing processes and extremes of abstraction and romanticism. She also explored the use of 'humble' and found materials to make her works - Xerox copies, plastic, paper, paint. Wilson-Pajic then undertook a vast investigation into the possibilities of the photogram that creates, according to the artist, a different dynamic between spectator/object/representation: the photogram-imprint is at once more removed from the object itself by the abstract nature of the image, and at the same time more concrete, or ‘real’, without artifice. In contrast to the use earlier artists have made of the photogram in relation to painting, Nancy Wilson- Pajic is interested in this historical photographic form as documentation, in the particular relationship that it creates between the object and its imprint, and the shadow that it leaves behind.

The forthcoming exhibition at Galerie Miranda will present works from key chapters of the artist's career; from early feminist expressions to pioneering experimentations with traditional photographic process, Nancy Wilson- Pajic has incessantly questioned the essential functions of the photographic medium, the role in society of art and of the artist. Several early conceptual series will be presented, notably Perfect shade of gray (1978-79), a series of 8 mixed media photo-painting works of a wintry landscape, an 'anti-aesthetic' project that captures the artist's early calling into question of the artistic posture and the representative function of photography; Drifter (1983-87), a large-format series of text/image gum bichromate prints of car travel created with a rudimentary camera through a car window on the highways of the Paris suburbs; large format photograms in cyanotype from her emblematic series Falling Angels (1995-97) and Les Divas (2004), and several unique self-portraits from the early 1970s. The exhibition title is a nod to the camera less and experimental photography of the 1920s developed by Christian Schad (1894-1982, German) and dubbed 'schadographs' by Tristan Tzara: "small compositions of torn paper, newsprint, and fabric... arranged on sheets of photographic paper, pressed flat under glass, and exposed to light on the balcony window… the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life."1

1 Metropolitan Museum

Artist Statement

"Photography is an important element in the dialogue internal to my work. Having always been more or less isolated — by my gender, my orientation and my independent character — from a dialogue with other actors of the art scene, I learned to play my ideas off against different aspects of my work. I would discover something working in installation or performance, describe it in a photo-text work, and then try to formulate the hypothesis in writing. The dialogue which developed within my work, between text, image, object and space, meant that my work evolved in a unique way and created fundamentally different techniques and approaches. It meant using simple and direct means of communication: words and images, creating by their interaction emotional and intellectual resonances. It also meant working on the mechanisms which render an image or a work "poetic", on the particular power of the imprint as it differs from that of the representation, and on the dividing line between "oeuvre" & "document" or between artwork and banal object.

When I began to show to a larger public in the early 70s, the viewer entered into the conversation, becoming not a spectator, but a privileged interlocutor. The new public for art posed problems which nobody knew how to solve, so my research began to have relevance for other artists. One of the specific roles of photography in my personal method of research is as the primary vector of aesthetic distance. Photographing something and examining it through the photograph allows me the distance necessary to be objective about what I have done much more quickly than if I had to rely on time to remove me from direct contact with the work. In a certain sense, every photograph I make is in some way documentary."

Nancy Wilson-Pajic
Nogent, 2025

Nancy Wilson-Pajic
Born 1941, USA
Living and working in France since 1978

"Based in New York in the 60s and 70s, Nancy Wilson-Pajic played an important role in the international artistic avant-garde of the time with her text-sound installations and narrative works that often explored and questioned feminine role models. She would comment twenty years later that “Working on female roles, using photography, posing for disguised self-portraits, and making works entirely in text and recorded sound; at the time I was doing it, did not conduct one directly to fame and fortune. It was rather looked upon as subversive and anti-artistic. This is hard to imagine today…”. In 1972, she co-founded, with 16 other women artists, the feminist gallery A.I.R. situated at 97 Wooster Street, NYC.

In 1978 Nancy Wilson-Pajic moved to Paris where she began exploring the representative character of photography in relation to text and other forms of information, “My work is concerned with the processes by which information accumulates and is transformed – by juxtaposition with other information, by memory, and by the individual’s order of priorities. I have used sound recordings and written text, video and film, photographs, drawings and computer technologies — in installations, in book form and on the wall — to create mental spaces within which creative reflection may take place.” Her early experiments with traditional photographic processes such as gum bichromate, carbon transfer, photogram, cyanotype, established Nancy Wilson-Pajic as a precursor of the artists’ photography movement.

Throughout her distinguished and singular career Nancy Wilson-Pajic has participated in more than 400 personal and group exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world and three retrospective exhibitions have been devoted to her work by contemporary art museums. Her work features in the permanent collections of the Musée national d'art moderne (Paris), Musée d'Élysée (Lausanne), French National collection (Fonds national d’Art contemporain, Paris), Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Museet for Fotokunst (Odense), Nouveau Musée national de Monaco, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum (Seoul, Korea) and the Musée Réattu (Arles), to name but a few.

In 1996 the French Ministry of Culture named her Chevalière des Arts et des Lettres, in honour of her contribution to the French cultural sector and in 2019 Paris Photo honoured her in the 'Elles' curated selection of works on the fair.