Sandrine Pagny: Big Mammas is on view at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils, Paris
February 17 – March 26, 2022
Lefebvre & Fils gallery is pleased to present the new work by Sandrine Pagny, in collaboration with Aurélie Julien Collectible.
Sandrine Pagny torments porcelain. But the curves that she flatters, the contours that she caresses, display a polychrome satisfaction, with moods translated by an important work of color. This time, the artist rushes to an unprecedented scale, largely doubling his habits to end up with a dozen large capacities. These ornate bellies face us from all their faces, from all their buttocks. The opportunity to recall the eminently sensual jargon used to name the lip, the neck, the shoulder, the belly, the foot or the bottom of a pottery. Sandrine Pagny’s sculptures thus see their base turned then their volume mounted on a coil, before returning to the wheel to undergo final deformations and complete their plump silhouette. Pinches and gaps titillate the flesh, and if the surfaces are smooth, revenge manifests itself by provoking the established cannons. A claim asserts itself. Small mouths in clusters seem to want to catch their breath. It breathes. So the artist seeks to go further, to change the landscape, to other expanses. The amplitude of the greasy marbles motivate the gestation of fantastic panoramas. And among all, it is the volcanic reliefs that offer the most fertile soil. Those of Sandrine Pagny ooze abundance. Generating these new templates was acrobatic, involving new glazing processes, revised temperature curves, and above all ingenuity for charging, knowing that some pieces know up to six firings. You have to imagine these dripping Venuses in a makeshift enamel cabin, a Botticelli-esque plastic sandbox, and maneuvered by tinkering with a system combining a slide, a weight machine and a lifting pulley. Whether it’s the oven or the rest, it’s always about getting out of a cavity. In the light.
Text by Joel Riff, exhibition curator, Moly-Sabata / Albert Gleizes Foundation
Sandrine Pagny was born in Echirolles in 1978. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Grenoble, she worked at the Jousse Entreprise gallery where she encountered the ceramic object. She then trained in this practice by joining the Duperré School of Applied Arts and then obtained a training grant in the arts and crafts of the city of Paris in order to improve her skills. For several years, she worked in collective workshops in Paris and taught ceramics.
In September 2020, her first solo exhibition “Backlash” took place at the Didier Luttenbacher gallery, rue des Beaux-Arts in the Parisian district of Saint Germain des Prés. In 2017, she set up her production workshop in Burgundy. She has lived and worked since between Paris and Pouilly sur Loire. Since 2016, she regularly reactivates a series of containers entitled “I’m Not a Fucking Unicorn”, the year in which she also began her collaboration with agent Aurelie Julien Collectible.
Essentially turned, these porcelain pieces are then modeled and perforated, the deformations depriving the pieces of any useful value. Her work also includes more sculptural pieces, where color is at the center of his technical and visual explorations. She focuses her research on using kaolin, first of all for its great plasticity. but also for the luminosity it brings to ceramic engobes as well as the possibility of a wider palette of enamels.
Contact
lefebvreetfils@gmail.com
Galerie Lefebvre & fils
24, rue du Bac
75007 Paris
France
Photos copyright Benoit Fougeirol
