Elsa Sahal Monography
Patrick Javault’s guests on this occasion are the artist Elsa Sahal and the curator Camille Morineau, co-author of a newly released book-length study of Sahal’s work.
“Elsa Sahal’s ceramics – abstract yet figurative, adorable yet abject, elegant yet lanky, male yet female, pathetic yet striking – give birth to a world that is as unsettling as it is gratifying.” Mara Hoberman.
Elsa Sahal’s body of work is characterised by a striking dichotomy between her use of ceramics – an age-old technique often associated with craft practices – and her highly contemporary, embodied, living discourse, that can only be expressed via the specific materiality of her chosen medium.
Elsa Sahal, who first made a name for herself on the late 1990s art scene, studied with Georges Jeanclos, graduating from the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Over the years, she has developed her own unique artistic vocabulary, alternating between uncanny figurativism and joyful abstraction, creating a strange biomorphic repertoire, a language in which the body and femininity are constantly questioned and staged in single organs and orifices or in visceral creations heightened by her powerful use of colour and the enamel covering the stoneware ceramic pieces.
Elsa Sahal’s career has been managed by the Galerie Claudine Papillon since 1999. Her work is of major significance on the contemporary art scene, being exhibited at the Fondation Ricard in 2008; she was awarded the prize for contemporary sculpture by the Fondazione Francesco Messina (Casabeltrame, Italy) in 2007 and the MAIF Sculpture Prize in 2008.
THE AUTHORS
Mara Hoberman is a freelance curator, art critic and editor. She regularly contributes to Artforum, ArtAgenda and the New York Times and has edited special issues for Artforum.
Camille Morineau is a heritage curator who graduated from France’s prestigious National Heritage Institute. She was formerly contemporary collections curator at the Pompidou Centre, where one of her main projects was overseeing the exhibition elles@centrepompidou. Her freelance work includes the 2014 exhibition on Niki de Saint-Phalle at the Galeries nationales in the Grand Palais in Paris. She is also the founder and director of AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions).
