STUDIO, WOUNDS AND BATTLES, DESIRE IS THE REITERATION OF HOPE - Cathy de Monchaux

Le Palais de Tokyo is presenting, on April 3, 2026 at 10:00, a retrospective of Cathy de Monchaux, a leading figure on the British art scene, through a body of some fifty works dating from 1984 to the present. The exhibition pulls us between epidermal desires and dangers, bringing together technical drawings, archives of destroyed works, sculptures and installations—vertical or horizontal, on the wall or on the floor; the artist unsettles familiar reference points, in particular the phallocracy of philosophical and artistic language, a “privilege accorded to rectitude […] to the symbolism of the phallus and, in turn, a reduction of the woman to the matter-matrix, to the mother, to the vagina-uterus.”

It is also a play of scales, from the intimate to the demonstrative, and of materials, from the nap of velvet to the chill of metal, that lacerate our vulnerabilities in order to rekindle their power. A clinical eye might dissect folds, lead, dust, tracing paper, lattices of rivets, straps, marble, orifices, fairy-like vulvas, intertwinings of unicorns and frogs swarming through forests of rooted bodies—places where trees shield the opacity of the landscapes.

There are, among other references, minimalist thought; gothic surges (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 testify to the artist’s written practice, each a fizzing tone: “Never forget the power of the tears.”

Her more recent work emerges in bas-relief like a backlit imagination, frozen between the urgency of dazzlement and pervasive panic in a fractal universe: vines are roots that are bodies that are souls that are struggles and could also be imprints in need of tending. There is also a concern with depth and new perspectives, carved out in negative space.

We find armies of unicorns that refer very directly to the artist’s earliest work, still present in her studio as a protective totem, which she made as a student. A skeleton like an armature recalls, traumatically, a car accident in which the artist nearly died, followed by an accident with her horse. One might think that, at that precise moment, her wounded imagination was formed—an imagination where structures support as much as they bind and oppress.

The artist’s sculpture is that of the great-small split—that displacement that makes sensuality threatening and fear hypnotic. The fabric of sorrow is never far beneath the prickly armatures: fossils, memories, prostheses, fetishes—underneath the surface of bodies and feelings.

In search of an intimate, political and collective emotional overload, Cathy de Monchaux’s work kneads forms and emotions until it leaves this taste in our eye: that of metal under the tongue, where one can even pause in contemplation.