PUPA NEUMANN
(the other self, the artist of thresholds and doubling)
Pupa Neumann was born within the life of Céline Nieszawer, though not at the same time. She is an artist who exists in the interstices, emerging when the work requires another voice, another angle of vision. If Céline attends to the world, Pupa listens to its reverberations. She moves through photography, video, drawing, and text with the understanding that identity is porous, that the self can split in order to see itself more clearly.
Her origins lie in the same apprenticeship in New York, yet her gaze approaches the city differently, attuned to its shadows and echoes. As a photographer she searches for what escapes naming, for the gestures that vanish before they settle into meaning. Her films and experimental videos lean toward chance and interruption, allowing the accidental to speak. When she steps into history, as in La Madeleine de Gide, she disturbs it gently, opening the past to new possibilities of fiction and recognition.
Her exhibitions in Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Brussels, Basel, Amsterdam, and Lodi trace the wanderings of a sensibility drawn to reflection and instability. Doppelgänger and the Lost Control drawings articulate her central concern: the self as multiplicity, the image as threshold. Her books and photo-narratives, from Claude to Guacamole Vaudou, make visible the ongoing dialogue between word and image, memory and invention, Céline and Pupa.
Pupa Neumann is not a pseudonym. She is the necessary other, the artist who steps forward when the work requires displacement, rupture, or transformation. Her presence recalls the tension in Borges’s “Borges and I”, the recognition that identity expands when divided.
She lives and works between Paris and Milan. The works gathered in The Pasticheur reveal a practice attentive to the unstable, the doubled, and the luminous. They offer not a retrospective but an unfolding, a space where one voice speaks through another and the self becomes an instrument of inquiry.
We are honored to offer this glimpse into her radiant, restless world. More of her work may be explored on her website and Instagram account.
