Juliette Mangenot is interested in the existential link with others and the world. She questions emotional dependence and the fear of abandonment. This fluctuating bond is embodied by characters whose bodily appearance takes the form of their interiority. Her forms, in tension, merge and separate, echoing the original bond with the mother, broken at birth. Her formal approach is in line with the concept of fragmentation of the body, instigated by Rodin in deidealised figuration and extended by Arp in organic abstraction. Both artists express the reality of the human soul through the body. Juliette Mangenot’s approach is identical: the denatured body is the authentic embodiment of interiority. It is characterised by the recurring theme of the emotional bond between two beings, in its rupture or its state of fusion. Her multi-disciplinary work includes drawing, engraving and sculpture, a three-dimensional extension of the engraved line. Her creative process is guided by the unconscious. With no prior mental image, her hands shape the form intuitively. The materials chosen are bare, with no artifice or colour other than white, black and the shades of grey that link them together. The spectator is invited to experience his or her own interiority by asking what connects him or her to others and to the world.

The need to create has always been an obvious choice. Introduced to drawing and pottery as a child in a local workshop, at the age of 15 she joined the ceramic sculpture workshop run by Hans Marks in Neuilly.

After studying for 5 years at Penninghen, she graduated in 2000, but her artistic hunger remained unfulfilled as she pursued her career as a graphic designer. Motivated by this need to create, she left the workforce and became a freelancer in 2006 to develop her artistic activity. Introduced to printmaking during an Erasmus stay in Norway, at the National College of Art in Oslo, she joined the Arquebusiers printmaking studio in 2002, run by Mireille Baltar, where she had her first solo exhibition in 2004. For ten years she explored the various techniques of intaglio: aquatint, etching, drypoint, then burin, which became her favourite tool. In 2002, she presented a collection of aquatints on the theme of the violence of feeling, associating disfigured bodies and faces with the verses of Verlaine and Baudelaire, and won the Reynal “Grant for an engraver” from the Fondation de France. In 2004, this grant enabled him to attend the International School of Graphic Design in Venice to learn cardboard engraving. In 2005, his series of drypoints on the theme of weightlessness was selected by the Musée de Saint Maur for the Biennale de l’Estampe. It features characters floating in mid-air and interacting with each other. In 2009, her work was once again awarded the ‘Graver maintenant’ prize at the Salon de l’estampe in Rueil-Malmaison. In 2010, she took part in a group exhibition of the 6 previous prize-winners at the Ermitage in Rueil-Malmaison, with a series of etchings on the theme of family ties. That same year, she exhibited a series of prints inspired by portraits of women by photographer Mama Casset at Galerie Branca in Geneva. She took part in the nuit de l’estampe at Place Saint-Sulpice on three occasions. A burin specialist, she met Nathalie Grall in 2013 and worked with her for a few days in Lille. She joined the Bo Halbirk workshop in 2014, where she perfected her burin technique. Meeting Cécile Reims encouraged her in this direction. In 2015, she exhibited at the 15th International Printmaking Biennial in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. In 2016, the Prodromus gallery offered her an exhibition with four other artists. In 2017 she took part in a group exhibition with 10 artists from the studio, in Thisted in Denmark and in Hollerich Luxembourg in 2018.

Wishing to go further in metalwork and give it a new dimension, she trained in jewellery at the Boule school in 2018. She was particularly interested in the wax technique, which she took further in the same year at the same school. Enthused by this return to the material, she quickly felt the limitations of the miniature format. The call to sculpture was an obvious way to give free rein to her creativity.

Armed with this conviction, she joined the Clay collective studio in 2019. Rediscovering the powerful freedom offered by sculpture, the culmination of her years of printmaking, she opened her own collective studio in Neuilly in 2020. It was an enriching experience, but managing a group proved incompatible with the peace of mind needed to create. In 2022 she set up her own studio on rue Oberkampf.

© Juliette Mangenot 2023. All rights reserved.

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