Currently living and working in Paris, Auvray has been a painter since she was a teenager and it is remarkable that her style has not changed for the past twenty years except that more art pieces, sculptures and ceramics have been added to her works. As a painter, Auvray said that she completely lost her inhibitions when she started working with ceramics, which was therapeutic. She has gained enormous attention for her drawings and works that feature a combination of media not often combined with each other. For example, due to her creatively blending the fibers from brooms with ceramics, the ordinary brooms are transformed into mystical scepters. Especially when appearing together with beasts that have a raw, organic and rugged appearance, they create an unbelievably beautiful harmony, which is surprising but not accidental. Thirty eight pieces of works will be displayed, which include the newly made ceramic and drawing pieces.
Perce neige & Parasite
The brooms were fired in La Borne, a small village two hours south of Paris. The beasts were fired in Moly Sabata near Lyon this summer. It was my first experience with a wood kiln. Then the works were all finished and assembled in my studio in Paris located probably fifteen minutes away from where I was born in the seventies......
All my works are bits and pieces found here and there in the hazards (chances) of my journey and experiences. I always puts stones and pieces of wood or plastic in my pockets because I find them beautiful or maybe because I want to remember a special moment with different people or just as a very ancient gesture… And then back in the studio I like to reassemble them and tie them in a different way to make my own story with them.
The drawings are combination of monoprints I made from sketchbooks I carried in Mexico (mostly in Anahuacalli Museum) and things I see in my everyday life (seahorses from a postal calendar on my studio wall), any details that you could notice in your daily routine life and that you may use later as a pattern.
I never start a sculpture looking at a drawing but they are all in my brain and fingers when I start to work with clay. The fibers were collected mostly in the south of France in Sanary-sur-Mer on the beach and some were collected in Zuma Beach in California during the big fire of Santa Ana.
Most of my works are connected with travelling and collecting stuff along the way. I would like to imagine now the brooms being able to take me anywhere on the planet just with my sense of imagination. It would be funny if each broom could take you to one special destination.
I first started to do Brooms in Texas a couple of years ago when I was doing a residency at the Chinati foundation in Marfa. I became a friend there with an old guy who had a broom shop next to a petrol station. He was collecting sticks in the desert and making domestic brooms with them. I would spend a lot of time in his shop; I loved the ambiance in there. Full of fibers and straw on the floor, threads of many colors and old cactus bone piled up... of course I immediately thought this was a witch broom factory. It was so poetic but it was just a simple shop for one of the most used tools in the world: a broom.
I love that brooms as a sculpture can be identified by anyone -- they are one of the most common domestic tools -- but are also associated with many rituals, religious or otherwise, and they can raise so many fantasies in our head (mostly about those weird ladies that we call witches). I like this simplicity and humility. I always like to work with simple materials such as clay and plaster; marble and bronze always scared me a little by being "grandiose".
So I started making broom handles with clay and like usual when I start using clay, little figures emerge out of them. I don't know where they come from. They are just there always in my head and at the tip of my fingers each time I draw or sculpt.
I like to mix and match, shuffle things like playing cards, make "cadavres exquis" because putting things in a different order gives them different meanings and is the start for new stories in your imaginative world.
-Sylvie Arvray
Sylvie Auvray
Born in 1974 and graduated from the Fine Art School of Montpellier, France in 1993 and received B.A. degree from fine art painting City & Guilds of London Art School, England in 1996. Her collections include Collection du Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France ; Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France; FRAC Nouvelle Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, France.
Main solo exhibitions include Aux foyers, Moly Sabata, Fondation Albert Gleizes, Sablons, France (2020); Les Cambuses, Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris, France (2019); John's feet, Chamberlain building, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, U.S.A. (2016); Rings, Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich, Switzerland (2015). Her recent group exhibitions include All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, U.S.A. (2020); La Musée, commissaire Azad Asifovich, Galerie italienne, Paris, France (2019); Citoyennes paradoxales, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne collection, Palais du Tau, Reims, France, Fire and Clay, Galerie Gagosian, Geneva, Switzerland (2018); Medusa, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France (2017); Nouveau Festival, Xavier Douroux, Peinture Parlée, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2009).
Artist-in-residences include Ceramic Arts program in California State University, Long Beach, California, U.S.A. (2017 and 2019); Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, U.S.A. (2016).
