Écorchée Vive: the shocking exhibition on femininity and the body at the Galerie La Lison

When the body becomes language and living matter... Sculptor trained at the École supérieure d'ébénisterie d'Avignon, Emilie Le Mené, alias Ono, takes over the Galerie La Lison from November 13 to December 27, 2025, with a powerful exhibition entitled Écorchée Vive, presented by the Astra Artem gallery. A true artistic cry, this work explores the limits of the body, femininity, and the invisible wounds that shape our lives. Through a series of pieces sculpted in wood, plaster, or porcelain, the artist presents a sensitive, marked, resistant material, where each fragment of flesh becomes a metaphor for lived experience.

In this exhibition, conceived by a woman for women and created with a resolutely feminine perspective, Ono reveals the tensions between the inner world and outward appearance, between the fragility of life and the density of material. Works such as Des papillons dans le ventre (Butterflies in the Stomach) and Féminité (Femininity) convey the raw flesh of intimacy, its pains as well as its impulses.

An artistic manifesto between anatomy and raw emotion.

Far from a technical demonstration, Écorchée Vive asserts itself as a manifesto of freedom and resistance, which embraces emotion without detours. Each piece seems to react to invisible forces—impulses, memories, silences—and the sculpted bodies speak where words fail. Butterflies in the stomach, palpitations, scars, every detail evokes universal sensations: those we all carry, those we often keep silent.

The wood, worked in the traditional manner, resists as much as it yields. Ono sculpts with the intensity of lived experience, inscribing a kind of cartography of the soul into the material. Plaster and porcelain, sometimes gilded, provide contrasts: density and delicacy, hardness and poetry, in a deeply human revelation. His inspirations—17th-century vanitas, 19th-century romanticism, the symbolism of organs—weave a narrative in which the organic becomes language.

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An exhibition that explores intimacy and its scars.

Écorchée Vive is for those who wish to immerse themselves in an introspective, emotional, and confrontational experience. Lovers of contemporary art, enthusiasts of working with materials, explorers of the intimate and the symbolic, you will find here a space that echoes your own journeys. It is also a place conducive to moments for two, discussions among friends, outings among enthusiasts, where impressions and thrills are shared.

However, this exhibition is not intended for an audience seeking conceptual abstraction or aesthetic lightness. Here, there is no filter or distance: the works challenge, shake you up, confront you with flesh, grief, identity. This is not a contemplative stroll, but an immersion in the density of lived experience.

An exhibition that sculpts our silences.

In the raw setting of the Galerie La Lison, eachof Ono's sculptures seems to pulsate under the gaze, as if the body were reclaiming its language. The artist does not merely tell a personal story; she paints a collective fresco of the wounded and vibrant feminine, of the body as the memory of the world. The exhibition's layout is fluid, organic, almost anatomical: we pass through hybrid forms, between skulls and hearts, between skin and cavities, between birth and finitude.

With Écorchée Vive, matter becomes manifest, and the body a sacred territory to be reclaimed. The exhibition establishes itself as a space for dialogue where art becomes an answer, a question, a breath. An experience to be lived fully, consciously, for all those who feel that their bodies, too, are carriers of stories.

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