Anne Poirier met her alter ego, Patrick Poirier (born 1942), while they were both students at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. They began to travel together regularly to the Far and Middle East and to the United States, before becoming residents of the Villa Medici in Rome from 1967 to 1970. From then on, they decided to work together as a unit. Their artistic activity reaches beyond the traditional categories of painting and sculpture in that it flirts with archaeology and architecture. Since the start of their collaboration, their work has focused mainly on the subjects of memory, fragments, and ruins. They make equal use of a variety of mediums, including scale models, photography, herbariums, sculpture, installations, and artist’s books. They first became known for their “reconstructions” of legendary sites of antiquity, Ostia antica (1970-1972) and Domus aurea (1975-1978), which associate archaeological precision with fiction.
Their work is steeped in mythology, dreams, and utopia, in the spirit of both Jorge Luis Borges and Nicolas Ledoux. It has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, particularly at the Centre Georges-Pompidou (1978) and New York Museum of Modern Art (1979).
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