Stéphanie Cherpin
The "Entretiens sur l'art" cycle gives the opportunity to hear the word of an artist on their work in long term conversations. For this new interview, the art critic Jill Gasparina receives the artist Stéphanie Cherpin.
Stéphanie Cherpin has been making sculpture since the mid-2000s.
The first period of her work is organized around monumental works, resulting from the collection of objects and materials in urban and suburban areas, and giving rise to contradictory operations (decomposition/assembly, destruction/restoration, violence/softness, matter/surface, improvisation/control, construction/recycling...). This work of tense assembly, as brutal as it is decorative, is in line with artists such as Ed Kienholz, Jessica Stockholder, Anita Molinero, or Noah Puryfoy.
From the mid-2010s, this street sculpture gives way to a work whose subjectivity is more assumed. The range of gestures she uses expands, pop touches appear, while the scales of her pieces approach that of the body. This period corresponds to an intimate turn in her work, which now discreetly integrates personal and family stories, anecdotes, song lyrics, readings, and which develops more and more into an art of detail. It also goes hand in hand with a concern of the artist to situate her work more from the different positions she occupies as an artist (or at the same time that she produces art). For example, and without hierarchy, but with total pride: woman, teacher, trap and nail art lover, forty-year-old, mother, or inhabitant of a small town in the Paris suburbs.
Stéphanie Cherpin was born in 1979.
She lives and works between Deuil-la-Barre and Marseille.
Photo : Stéphanie Cherpin, Danse sur moi, (2020-2022), (c) Annik Wetter
