Annabelle Agbo Godeau at A. Romy Gallery

By cutting and pasting fragments from various sources onto the surface of the canvas, Annabelle Agbo Godeau creates fantastical settings where a profusion of symbolic details, ambiguous texts, and false pretenses are in dialogue. Her paintings draw from internet subcultures, 20th-century fetish content, and mythological tales.

Annabelle Agbo Godeau was born in France in 1995. After her DNASP at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2018, she moved to Germany to study with Ellen Gallagher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work has notably been the subject of two solo exhibitions in 2021: A spectacular woman BPA Space, Cologne; Stop searching (I got everything you need), Sonneundsolche, Düsseldorf. Agbo Godeau is nominated for the Revelations Emerige Prize in 2021.

Die Eiserne Hand

1. In 1504, the German knight Götz von Berlichingen lost his right arm at the wrist during the siege of the city of Landshut. Through the thirty years following his incident, he got two iron hands built for him. The second one was an intricate prosthesis with articulated joints and bending wrist which needed to be activated with his good hand. This complex handicraft was a reference in early modern medicine in the 19th century.

2. The first contact lenses were invented in 1887 by a German ophthalmologist. Made of glass, they could only be worn for a few hours at a time. The development of soft lenses in 1959 revolutionized the industry, although improper wearing and lack of hygiene can lead to various cornea infections.

3. In the 1940s, doctors discovered that contact lenses could be used to reshape the cornea to temporarily reduce myopia. Orthokeratology is the technique in which the user wears a special lens which lightly presses the cornea in the correct shape for focused vision, the corrective effect lasting up to 72 hours. It became accessible in the 1990s.

4. An early pregnancy test protocol was invented in 1927: it consisted of injecting a woman's urine into an immature rat to see if the animal had a resulting hormonal reaction. It was commercialized under the name Predictor, resembling a miniature chemistry test, with results available after two hours and a 20% chance of false negatives.

5. Final Destination is a series of movies where characters are victims of a death curse, dying one by one in various coincidental accidents where neutral actions pile up and lead to disaster. In the third opus, two young women get trapped in overheating tanning beds and burn alive inside them.

6. In 1999, a woman named *|W]YRQ%EHUOLFKQ was the first to get a hand transplant from a cadaver. She got murdered six years later by her ex-husband at the age of 34.

7. Margaret Crane, inventor of the early pregnancy test, never received money for her invention and only gained recognition in 2012. The "tanning bed curse" is used as a morality tale aimed at women about beauty and vanity.

8. Every night before going to bed, I wash my hands and carefully put on a red lens on my right eye and a blue one on the left. In the morning, I take them out with a little sucking tool and spend the day having my eyeballs return to their myopic, oblong shape. During the night, I see more clearly than during the day.