This winter in Paris, Mathilde Albouy’s work unfolds across two distinct yet closely linked exhibitions, offering a layered view into her sculptural universe. From January 8 to February 14, 2026, Albouy presents “Lucky You” at Galerie Derouillon, her first solo exhibition in the gallery’s main space, where new works construct an immersive setting shaped by chance, bodily awareness, and shifting power. Running concurrently, her work also appears in “Beyond Our Horizons: From Tokyo to Paris” at la Galerie du 19M, on view from January 29 through April 26, 2026, situating her practice within a broader dialogue between contemporary art, design, and craft.
At le19M, Albouy’s sculptures enter into conversation with the site’s eleven Maisons d’art—including Atelier Montex, Lemarié, Lesage, Goossens, and Maison Michel—where material intelligence and handwork form a shared foundation. Across both exhibitions, Albouy treats sculpture as a situation to be entered. Her forms invite proximity, provoke awareness, and gently unsettle the viewer’s role, asking what it means to look, to linger, and to be implicated in return.
Mathilde Albouy solo
show ‘’Lucky You’’,
Galerie Derouillon,
Paris, 2026; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris,
© Grégory Copitet.
WHITEWALL: “Lucky You” introduces the swamp as a fictional place of origin for your work an ethereal space without binarity or fixed meaning. When did this landscape first emerge in your thinking, and what does it allow you to explore that reality does not?
MATHILDE ALBOUY: The swamp first appeared in my work in 2022 with Leaking, Licking, a version of which is currently on view at the 19M in Paris. I conceive of it as a theater—a stage on which my works unfold. I am interested in how the narratives we absorb, from scientific discourse to fairy tales, shape our perception of reality. The swamp is a privileged site for the emergence of legends and mythologies. It is a living, unstable space, where the horizon remains uncertain, solid and liquid merge, and everything teems with life. It offered an ideal ground for the development of my work, a place in which my anger, seduction, disturbance, eroticism, and disgust can intertwine and coexist, resisting any form of Manichean categorization.
WW: You’ve described sculpture as an “erotic gesture,” rooted in touch, proximity, and material intimacy. How does this physical relationship with materials shape both the form of your works and the ideas they carry?
MA: Sculpture undeniably carries a sensual dimension. When I speak of eroticism, I mean it in an expanded sense that goes beyond the sexual and aligns with Audre Lorde’s definition in Uses of the Erotic. Erotic power resides in presence: it is an intensity embedded in the act rather than the act itself. I introduce a slight shift from reality, a way of working that perhaps echoes the gymnastics of speculative fiction. The enlargement of elements and the transvestism of materials aim to provoke a curiosity that can only be satisfied by returning to one’s own physical sensations in front of the work. This renewed attention to sensation becomes a tool for resisting desensitization.
Speculation, Thresholds, and Reflections
Mathilde Albouy, “I see you (III),” 2025,
Bois et bronze,
Wood and bronze,
Chaque sphère : 10 x
10 × 10 cm,
Each sphere: 4 x 4 x 4,
inches; Courtesy of the artist
and Galerie Derouillon,
Paris
© Grégory Copitet.
WW: Feminist science fiction plays a central role in your practice. What draws you to this genre, and how does speculative fiction help you imagine alternative systems of power, desire, and agency?
MA: Feminist science fiction breaks away from ideals of possession, conquest, or linear progress. It dismantles power relations structured by gender and race, while foregrounding qualities often devalued, such as intuition or empathy, as genuine forces of transformation. When I first read Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, I was deeply struck by her insistent use of the pronoun “elles”. I was surprised by how personally implicated I felt by such a simple yet radical gesture. These narratives foster a sense of expanded agency, an increasing capacity to imagine oneself otherwise. Speculation and hypothesis become tools for understanding the world we inhabit, while also generating “exit routes.” As Émilie Hache has noted, it is essential to cultivate these narratives in order to sustain the idea that hope exists, and to resist the belief that hope is only possible when everything is going well.
WW: The Widows series evokes windows, confinement, mourning, and emancipation all at once. How do you think about architecture—both domestic and symbolic as a structure that can oppress but also enable transformation?
MA: There are many portals in my work. The Widows can be understood as windows opening onto a swamp, as if one were enclosed. Their human-scale format also evokes a door. The wax surface produces a reflection, almost like a mirror, perhaps even a one-way mirror. These works operate as thresholds between two worlds. The wax, shifting from green to black as it fills the frame, suggests that it was poured in a liquid state and is now frozen between two conditions, holding the possibility that it might overflow again at any moment. I have often dreamed, since installing these works, that the gallery floor was flooded with this black wax.
WW: Eyes, peepholes, and platforms of display recur throughout “Lucky You,” creating a constant play of seeing and being seen. How do you approach the gaze in your work, particularly in relation to surveillance, exposure, and femininity today?
MA: This exhibition is the result of a reflection on desire and manipulation. What are the limits of their acceptability? I always think about the way the work will be seen: it functions as a direct address to the viewer. I like to place them in an active situation, notably through the use of screens and mirrors. I wanted to establish a tension within the exhibition, almost a paranoid effect, where, once attention is engaged, gazes begin to multiply. This makes me think of the scene in Snow White in which she flees the hunter and finds herself alone in the forest. After experiencing fear, her perception of reality shifts. A similar shift occurs here: after a first reading of the works, apparently “pleasurable,” something begins to seep. The viewer feels observed, perhaps even unwittingly desired.
Play, Risk, and Loss of Control
Mathilde Albouy, “Ohaguro (Can’t catch
me),” 2026,
Bois et encre de chine,
Wood and chinese ink,
92 x 199 cm,
36 1/4 x 78 3/8 inches; Courtesy of the artist
and Galerie Derouillon,
Paris,
© Youna Virus.
WW: Many of your sculptures appear seductive yet potentially dangerous, oscillating between attraction and unease. Is disorientation a strategy for you, and what do you hope it unlocks for the viewer?
MA: My exploration of disorientation is a strategy close to a game of vertigo, or ilinx, as Roger Caillois defines it. The first rule consists in accepting that one’s perception of reality is disturbed: one may be able to recognize what one sees, but something is off. At times it is a question of scale, at others of material. This deliberate shift opens a space for imagination and, in turn, compels a return to lived physical experience, to being fully present, here and now, in front of the work.
WW: Play is a key element in the exhibition, from references to games of chance to the carousel-like stripper’s platform. How do play and risk function as tools within your sculptural language?
MA: I play a lot in the studio. I layer ideas, cut them apart, move them around, and reassemble them.Lucy Lippard defines play as a tool for experimentation. That’s what attracts me to this protocol: this game is based on specific rules, but it’s the tension between them, or even their subversion, that opens up new possibilities. There is a fragile balance between control and risk, to which I myself am subject when I work. There is very little chance in my works, and yet something always escapes me in the end. This loss of control allows the work to exist on its own.
On the Edge of Movement
Mathilde Albouy, “Turn me on,” 2025,
Bois Wood,
270 x 240 × 240 cm,
106 1/4 x 94 1/2 x 94
1/2 inches; Courtesy of the artist
and Galerie Derouillon,
Paris,
© Grégory Copitet.
Mathilde Albouy, “Sphinge,” 2025,
Bois, cire, métal et
coquille d’oeuf,
Wood, wax, metal and
eggshell,
75,5 x 45 × 43 cm,
29 3/4 x 17 3/4 x 16 7/8
inches; Courtesy of the artist
and Galerie Derouillon,
Paris,
© Grégory Copitet.
WW: Your works often seem to possess their own agency, as if they might act back on the viewer. When you imagine the ideal encounter with your sculptures, what kind of experience or shift do you hope lingers afterward?
MA: I like to imagine the works as desiring objects, capable of “talking back.” I love it when people tell me it feels “as if they might start moving.” What interests me is this sensation of being on the threshold between two moments, two theatrical scenes. It is at this intersection that everything we have discussed converges: a presence that is simultaneously seductive and potentially threatening, where the boundary between pleasure and danger becomes increasingly porous.
