Garance Früh — Hard shells, tender skins — Ciaccia Levi Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Starts today: January 30 → March 29, 2025

Garance Früh — En questions Par la confrontation des matières et des formes, Garance Fruh oppose des ordres sensibles pour faire naître la perception ambiguë des corps dans le monde. De la douceur à la rupture, de l’exclusion à la fusion au sein de la communauté des chairs, le corps se fait témoin et agent d’une sensibilité dont chaque pièce de l’artiste semble appeler à une remise en cause profonde à travers une expressivité libérée et peut-être même libératoire. Actuellement en résidence à Lafayette Anticipations et avant une exposition personnelle à la galerie Ciaccia Levi, elle revient pour nous sur sa démarche artistique.

Ciaccia Levi gallery is pleased to welcome Garance Früh for her first solo exhibition, titled Hard shells, tender skins.

The exhibition presents a series of sculptures made from metal, fabric, and molded leather, through which the artist explores personal themes related to the constraints and anxieties exerted on the body. Complex and striking structures, robust yet vulnerable at once, these metal frameworks take on a new dimension when combined with the fabrics of shaping garments; these combinations then transform into matrices or supporting forms, suggesting a duality between limitation and support.

The sculpting garments not only reflect the desire to shape and constrain the body in a specific way but also to reinforce and firm it, aiming to resist its dissolution. Through the use of metal and fabric, Garance Früh evokes the familiar forms of 19th-century dress such as crinolines, corsets, and bustles, as well as protective structures like cradles.

These works, where hand-stitching and shaping blur together, resonate with images of nests and shells, evoking spaces that are both welcoming and confining.

The artist delves into an intimate exploration of her own anxieties and the anger they provoke, questioning the origins of these feelings in order to transform them in a quest to reclaim her own perception. The sculptures bear the weight of biological time and address complex subjects such as desires and repulsions related to maternity, the discomfort of social conventions, the anxiety of bodies aging, and the attempts to resist these inevitable changes.

The works were produced as part of the “ À l’œuvre ” residency Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris