On the occasion of Cathy de Monchaux’s exhibition Studio, Wounds and Battles, Desire Is the Reiteration of Hope, visitors are invited to explore the exhibition through a discussion between the artist Cathy de Monchaux, the curator and artistic advisor to François Pinault and curator at the Bourse du Commerce – Pinault Collection, Caroline Bourgeois, and the exhibition’s curator, Hugo Vitrani.

Cathy de Monchaux is a major figure on the British art scene. Presented as her first retrospective, the exhibition takes its title from the studio understood as a territory of struggle and wounds, but also of anticipation and hope: the hope of returning to the light of institutions that long remained absent. Bringing together around one hundred works made between 1984 and the present day, the exhibition unfolds the multiplicity of languages explored by the artist: sculptures, technical drawings and bas-reliefs that appear like a constellation of charged objects.  

This conversation offers an opportunity to reflect on more than four decades of artistic practice and to enter a universe in which Cathy de Monchaux sculpts a tactile threshold between the physical world and the subconscious. 

Working at the level of visceral and epidermal sensation, de Monchaux positions herself as a connective force, a prosthesis, an armature linking the organic to the mechanical, the real to the spiritual, the dream to the nightmare. A forensic gaze might attempt to catalogue the materials and forms that populate her work: folds of velvet, metal, lead, copper wire, dust, tracing paper, rivets, straps, marble; openings, vulvas, and phantasmagorical interlacings of bodies,pregnant or otherwise, alongside unicorns and frogs swarming through deeply rooted forests. Yet any attempt to fully capture her practice through description alone would inevitably fall short. Its essence resists intellectual reduction. De Monchaux’s imagination operates through shifts both vast and minute, displacements that render sensuality threatening and fear strangely hypnotic. Her forms often emerge in half-light, opening perspectives within surfaces that remainalmost flat.

• For this event, online ticketing is currently unavailable.
  Tickets can be purchased on-site only, at the Palais de Tokyo ticket desk, on the day of your visit.
• The discussion will be held in English with no French subtitles.  
• It will be preceded by a guided tour of the Studio, Wounds and Battles, Desire is the Reiteration of Hope exhibition.
• The discussion will take place in Salle 37.