The Palais de Tokyo presents the first retrospective of Cathy de Monchaux, a major figure on the British art scene, featuring a collection of around fifty works dating from 1984 to the present day. The exhibition pulls us between visceral desires and dangers, bringing together technical drawings, archives of destroyed works, sculptures and installations, vertical or horizontal, on the wall or floor; the artist disrupts established points of reference, particularly the phallocentrism of philosophical and artistic language, a “privilege granted to uprightness […] to the symbolism of the phallus and, at the same time, the reduction of woman to matrix-matter, to the mother, to the vagina-womb.”
It is also a play on scale, from the intimate to the demonstrative, and on materials, from the grain of velvet to the icy chill of metal, lacerating our vulnerabilities to reawaken their power. A clinical eye might dissect folds, lead, dust, tracing paper, lacework made from rivets, straps, marble, openings, enchanted vulvas, intertwined unicorns and frogs swarming through forests of rooted bodies, where trees guard the opacity of the landscapes. There are references, among others, to minimalist thought, Gothic impulses (from the Victorian era) with cryptic details, Romanticism, Symbolism, the forests of Shakespeare and Paolo Uccello, invisible beliefs, battles and science fiction. There are also titles that reveal the artist’s writing practice, each carrying its own effervescent tone: “Never forget the power of the tears” (Never forget the power of tears). Her more recent work emerges in bas-relief like an imagined world seen against the light, suspended between the urgency of dazzling brightness and encroaching panic within a fractal universe: vines are roots that are bodies that are souls that are struggles that might also be wounds in need of dressing. Composed like battle paintings, these works are also concerned with depth and new perspectives, carved into negative space. Here, armies of unicorns directly evoke the artist’s earliest work, which remains in her studio like a protective totem and was made while she was still a student. A skeleton serving as an armature, a traumatic reminder of a car accident in which the artist nearly died, followed by an accident involving her horse. One might imagine that her wounded inner world took shape at that precise moment—a world in which structures always support as much as they bind and oppress. The artist’s sculpture inhabits a great divide of small distances—a shift that makes sensuality threatening and terror hypnotic. The fabric of grief is never far away, beneath the sharp armatures, the fossils, memories, prostheses and fetishes, beneath the surface of bodies and feelings. In pursuit of an intimate, political and collective emotional overload, Cathy de Monchaux’s work kneads forms as it does emotions, until it leaves a taste in our eyes: the taste of metal beneath the tongue, a place where one might even pause in contemplation.
Admission: From 0 to 13 euros.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Antoine Aphesbero. © Adagp, Paris, 2026.