Galerie Templon in Paris features Jeanne Vicerial’s black and white pieces until 11th March 2023. For her very first gallery show in Paris, fifteen new textile sculptures are on view.

Born in 1991, Jeanne Vicerial lives and works in Paris. Her passion for clothes design began when she was a teenager. After studying costume design then obtaining a master’s in clothes design at the Paris École des Arts Décoratifs in 2015, she started a research project which resulted in a Sciences, Arts, Creation and Research PhD in 2019. She took her research further by teaming up with the mechatronics department at MINES ParisTech to develop a patented robotised process for producing made-to-measure clothes with no waste. She also chose an artistic path which led her to work with Hussein Chalayan before founding research and design studio Clinique vestimentaire. Tilda Swinton counts as one of her admirers.

“This army of presences stand tall, displaying their scars of sutured threads. Clad in their ‘armors’, they march proudly into the future, charting a history of femininity,” Jeanne Viceria

The first person in France to be awarded a PhD in practice-based fashion design, in 2019, and artist-in-residence at the prestigious Villa Medici in 2020, at 31 Jeanne Vicerial has already garnered widespread acclaim for her pioneering conceptual framework questioning bodies, envelopes, gender, toxic masculinity and materials.

This new exhibition sees Jeanne Vicerial appropriating the space with her silent army of figures and drawing inspiration from gothic mythology, crypts and dark literature. At the heart of the exhibition an imposing articulated robot, controlled by a software program, dances around a sculpture, weaving a web to capture it with a succession of delicate, endlessly repeated movements.

As she explains: “It’s interesting to note the parallels between the textile industry and the world of sculpture: both fields use the term ‘seams’ for the junction points, the places where parts interlink.”

–