Garance Früh at Ciaccia Levi, Paris

The 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, a creative support program of Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris.

Garance Früh (1992, Strasbourg, France) graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2018 and from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2020. She presented her first solo show, Soft Armor, at In Extenso, Clermont-Ferrand in 2023. She has participated in group shows such as Vielles coques et jeunes récifs at FRAC Ile de France (2024), Crumbling the antiseptic beauty, at Fondation Ricard (2024), Paris, One’s room, at Datsuijo, Tokyo (2024), Vous n’avez pas besoin d’y croire pour que ça existe at FRAC des Pays de la Loire in Nantes (2023), Le saint ennui at BQ, Berlin (2021). She was selected for the 67th Salon de Montrouge in 2023 and for the Prix Reiffers Art Initiative in 2024. In 2024, she did the residency “À l’œuvre” at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, and in 2023 she was in residency at Moly Sabata (Sablons) and at the Villa Belleville. She lives and works in Paris, France.