Agathe May — Par où le chemin ? — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 11 days: November 7 → December 20, 2025

The gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by Agathe May.

The work of Agathe May always raises some question about the world around us. To express her perception of this era, she uses tools that counter our ultra-fast-paced society: the woodcuts and complex inking procedures that she has developed require long, fastidious periods of work. Her artworks view our age through a subtle and sometimes offbeat lens; her sincerity and singularity form the basis of their timeless character.

Like an allegory of the life cycle, “Par où le chemin ?” (Where Is the Path?) — a large, painted polyptych etching, spanning over three metres — offers the panorama of a traditional rural setting, where, in the shade of a gentle hill, a farmyard scene plays out, like the clichéd image of a French village. But the image has a double meaning, also underpinning the difficulties of rural life, surviving through the blood, sweat, and tears of an ageing workforce, with their rugged brows and hands — both luminous and battle-worn. Children play alongside their grandparents, while their parents work in the city. Could this be a twilight moment? Yet at the same time, It is a world of incredible energy, in which the animals are omnipresent and far from being idealised, as they move to and fro, give birth, cluck, bleat, and even — in the case of a hysterical cat — take it out on their master.

It’s a fresco that is at once nostalgic and light-hearted, in which the animals observe the madness of humankind in a landscape attesting to successive generations.

Agathe May focuses on objects that appear anodyne and ordinary people, shedding light on those we don’t see, show, or look at: the elderly, the homeless, farmers, and the ugliness of our consumer objects. Anything but miserabilist, the artist simply shows life in all of its complexity, without a hint of Manichaeism.

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Born in 1956, Neuilly-sur-Seine. Lives and works in Montreuil.Graduated from Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Paris, in 1979.
She was resident at the Villa Medicis and the Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto, Japan.In 2017, she received the Mario Avati prize from the Beaux-Arts de Paris, followed by a solo exhibition at the Institut de France.

Agathe May’s engravings are inked like paintings, hand-printed, assembled, sticked together, setted off. The artist makes of each print a unique work, an image always reinvented.

“Par où le chemin ?” is Agathe May’s sixth exhibition at the gallery since 2007.