Margaux Compte-Mergier

Paris France 1994

Margaux Compte-Mergier was born in 1994 in Paris. She studied at EHESS in Paris, where she graduated with a Master's degree in Theory and Practice of Language and the Arts. She is a sculptor, performer, and author, living in Berlin and working between Paris and Berlin. She participates in numerous group exhibitions in France, Germany, and Mexico. She was a member of the Berlin art association Her Studio. In 2022 and 2023, she was an artist in residence at 104-Paris.

In December 2023, the Tignous Center for Contemporary Art in Montreuil, France, organized a solo exhibition of her work. She also exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin in February 2024. She participates in workshops in France and Germany. In her work, she questions our projections into the future, the presence of catastrophes in our imaginations, and the aesthetics of digital errors. Through motifs inspired by everyday life, animals, and the human body, she creates universes imbued with a "familiar strangeness.

«What sculpture will spill over us like a jar of oil? What sculpture will spread across this floor like hair at a hairdresser? Where are your sculptures, transparent like carafes?» With his desire to «enchant the vulgar matter» as his own language, Guillaume Apollinaire foresaw, in his lecture «La sculpture d’aujourd’hui» (1913), the multiple possibilities, infinite variations, and endless wiles of form. Beautiful intuition: with him, we are already tomorrow. And his astonishing intuitive agility undeniably accompanies the sculptural work of the artist Margaux Compte-Mergier. In her sculptures as in any landscape - even if metaphorical - the near and the distant converge, dimensional relationships create reliefs, and each sculpture delicately layers detail and fragment.
An arm torn off like a branch bending under the force of a strong wind; a single torso; a widowed foot; a navel that takes on the appearance of a wine glass, faces welded into double heads reminiscent of old-time carnival attractions. The entire body displays strongly an evident deconstruction. A total and almost grotesque frenzy of a familiar yet bizarre anatomy. The contortion of reality is shaped everywhere by fictions. And by frictions - since these sculptures abound with exogenous elements such as computer parts, tree bark, cleaning gloves, etc. The serendipitous exploration of the manipulation of mediums and DNA: the sculptures evoke the ever-changing versatility between humans and objects, the symbiosis of entities welding simple trash to human organs. From these cuttings, we could evoke tales, science fiction cinema, or even the improbable definition of the increasingly complex word (and concept) of the living. The artist draws on references from the ancient statuary to the elastic bodies of Eva Hesse, as well as the polysemic nature of Bruce Nauman.
A sculpture of vestige and high vertigo.

Laurent Boudier, art critic of the French journal Télérama
Text translated by Emilie Duranceau