Cathy de Monchaux at the Palais de Tokyo: the retrospective to see in Paris

The Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, presents the first retrospective in France of British artist Cathy de Monchaux, titled "Studio, Wounds and Battles. Desire is the Reiteration of Hope", running from 3 April to 13 September 2026. The exhibition brings together nearly fifty works and revisits four decades of creation, exploring the body, materials and intimate narratives.

In Paris, the Palais de Tokyo is dedicating a retrospective to Cathy de Monchaux, titled Studio, Wounds and Battles. Desire is the Reiteration of Hope, from 3 April to 13 September 2026. The first major exhibition in France devoted to the British artist brings together nearly fifty works created from 1984 to today. Sculptures, installations, technical drawings and archives chart a journey around the body, its metamorphoses, its tensions and its injuries. The show unveils a universe threaded with desire, memory, confinement, and power relations.

Designed as a sensory journey, the exhibition is built around a fragmented spatial arrangement, where artworks extend across walls, floors, and ceilings. The volumes interact freely, without hierarchy, in a scenography that dismantles conventional notions of form and symbolism. Through this intentionally unstable construction, the artist challenges established norms of representation, gender codes, and the association of verticality with authority. The Palais de Tokyo offers visitors an immersive experience into a universe where material becomes language, and shapes serve as vessels for a critical and poetic imagination.

Materials, Symbols, and Fragments: An Organic and Fragmented World

In a constant play of scale, the artworks navigate the space between the infinitely small and the spectacular. Cold metal, worn velvet, straps, lead, marble, rivets — these materials interact with shapes inspired by animals, plants, or anatomy. The result is a tactile, ambivalent aesthetic that merges elements of Romanticism, science fiction, and a distinctly Victorian Gothic imagination.

The objects on display evoke themes of relics at times, and at others, fetishes, creating a layered narrative. Some pieces are meant solely for visual appreciation, while others engage the viewer’s imagination, prompting them to piece together fragments of stories. Among the exhibits, one can find unicorns, anatomical organs, hybrid silhouettes, as well as symbols of resistance and survival. These are complex objects—neither purely decorative nor merely storytelling—that are intentionally crafted to evoke a tension between allure and discomfort.

A Timeless Masterpiece: Exploring Archives, Stories, and Mythology

Many of the pieces on display originate from archives of lost works, while others are being shown for the very first time. The oldest installation by Cathy de Monchaux, created during her student years, continues to serve as a crucial touchstone in her artistic journey. It takes the form of a unicorn skeleton, a haunting extension of a childhood trauma stemming from a fall from a horse. This foundational piece repeatedly reemerges in her visual imagination.

The exhibition also highlights the artist's writing process, evident in the titles of their works, which carry narratives and subtle meanings. Once upon a Fuck, once upon a Lifetime, once upon a Duchamp and Never forget the power of the tears exemplify this textual dimension that complements the sculptures. The overall presentation offers a visual language that is self-contained, avoiding spectacle while engaging with profound symbolic layers.

An Artistic Stance on the Margins of Media Trends

Active since the 1980s, Cathy de Monchaux was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998. Her work is highly personal, diverging from the dominant visual language of the Young British Artists movement, with which she is nevertheless historically associated. She has exhibited at venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum, and notably the Centre Pompidou, including in the 1996 exhibition Féminin - Masculin, le sexe de l’art.

Her work is featured in several prominent international public collections, including the Tate Gallery, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the FRAC Occitanie Montpellier. In 2007, she was commissioned to create a piece for Newnham College in Cambridge, inspired by Virginia Woolf's famous lecture that led to A Room of One's Own. This commission exemplifies her focus on bas-relief works that explore the history of women in public and intellectual spaces.

An unconventional setting for an inspiring proposal

The exhibition invites visitors to explore contemporary sculpture, stories of the body, and artistic practices that challenge conventional norms. Without favoring a particular approach, it lends itself to various perspectives—whether emotional, analytical, or immersive—in a space designed to accommodate a diversity of viewpoints.

Through a journey that is both fragmented and seamless, the Palais de Tokyo offers an experience where visitors are encouraged to project their own interpretations. Between formal tensions and buried stories, the works of Cathy de Monchaux leave many pathways open—each one inviting exploration at your own pace, like an array of possible routes through an internal landscape.

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