PARIS.- Inspired by the etymology of the word "text", derived from the Latin textus (fabric, weave) and the verb texere (to weave), the exhibition The Subversive Stitch explores how acts of weaving, sewing, and layering become a visual language. To weave, to write, to build—these are material and symbolic acts that connect the body, space, and memory. The exhibition title, borrowed from Rozsika Parker’s essay, echoes a reflection on textiles as spaces of resistance, reappropriation, and narration—often rendered invisible or relegated to so-called minor or domestic art spheres.
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Through sculptural, pictorial, and installation-based practices, the three artists featured in the exhibition explore the friction zones between rigidity and flexibility, interior and exterior, visible and invisible. They propose artworks as woven surfaces where industrial materials, gestures, and fragmented narratives intertwine.
The Subversive Stitch weaves a sensitive dialogue between the practices of Charlotte Simonnet, Lana Von Thorn, and Talia Maidenberg. Each explores surface, structure, and memory as spaces of inscription, tension, and metamorphosis. Charlotte Simonnet develops a logic of sculptural oxymoron by hybridizing architectural, industrial, and organic forms into installations that proliferate like living organisms. Metal, shaped in tension or torsion, interacts with the fluidity of woven forms, challenging the very notion of foundation—both physical and symbolic. Her works evoke dynamics of growth, contamination, and propagation, as active forms of weaving that question the stability of visible structures.
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Lana Von Thorn works with an aesthetic of the grid through notions of transparency, monumentality, and tension. From the metallic mesh of fencing to the squares of a notebook—and vice versa—the artist weaves a back-and-forth between drawing and text. Starting from mesh—as both barrier, filter, and support—she introduces writing as a narrative and sensory fabric.
Letters replace figurative outlines to form images; intimate texts, fragmented like diary entries, sketch an inner world where language becomes material, rhythm, and breath.
Her installations thus transform into mental habitats, where the inner voice takes on a physical form in works that act as refuges.
This play between visibility and erasure, between represented body and perceived gaze, finds another echo in the pictorial work of Talia Maidenberg. In her paintings, the female image is deconstructed and then reconfigured: drawing on popular iconography—paparazzi, eroticism, public figures—she builds a mental theater where painting, both diaphanous and saturated, becomes a space for reversing the gaze. The female figures she summons, often isolated, seem acutely aware of their roles as watched performers. They play with it, subvert it, resist it. Painting thus becomes a space of projection and disquiet, amplified by silhouette sculptures that extend the canvas into physical space. In this back-and-forth between figuration and abstraction, intimacy and spectacle, surface and depth, Talia’s work also unfolds as a form of weaving—of affects, gazes, and narratives.
The Subversive Stitch highlights practices where the act of weaving—be it sculptural, patial, or pictorial—becomes a strategy of subversion.
The artists engage bodies, materials, and stories in a shared fabric that is both fragile and resistant, where texture becomes meaning.
To write, to sew, to sculpt: these are all ways of inhabiting the world differently, of unraveling oppressive structures, and proposing new ways to navigate through them.
Charlotte Simonnet was born in 2000 in Besançon, France. She lives and works in Paris.
She is currently a fifth-year student in the studios of Tatiana Trouvé and Dominique Figarella at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. From August 2023 to January 2024, she studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in Asier Mendizabal’s studio.
She has had the opportunity to present her work at Saint-Eustache Church as part of the Rubis Mécénat Prize (2024), at the Centre Wallonie- Bruxelles for (((Interférence_s))) (2024), at the Pernod Ricard Foundation (2022), at the Chloé Salgado Gallery and Chapelle XIV (2024), at the Studiolo Milan studio (2024), as well as in several group exhibitions in France.
In 2023, she received the Thaddaeus Ropac Prize during the award ceremony of the Friends of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Talia Maidenberg was born in 1998 in Boulogne- Billancourt. She lives and works in Paris.
She is currently completing her DNSEP in Mimosa Echard’s studio at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. She previously studied Human, Social, and Political Sciences, majoring in Social Anthropology within the Department of Urban Anthropology and Middle Eastern Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK.
In 2024, she held a solo exhibition at Sorgenfri Gallery in Oslo, Norway. She has also taken part in several group exhibitions, notably at the Beaux- Arts de Paris, Espace à Vendre gallery (Nice), and Oddity gallery (Paris).
Talia Maidenberg will participate in an exhibition at the Art Encounters Foundation in Timișoara (Romania), opening on October 17, 2025.
Born in 1997, Lana Von Thorn lives and works in Paris.
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she has worked in the studios of Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano. Lana Von Thorn explores, through a minimalist plastic universe, the infinite possibilities of wire mesh as a sculptural means of expression.
She has presented her work in several solo exhibitions, notably at Galerie des Minimes (Paris), as well as in New York and Los Angeles during a design and architecture residency.
She has also participated in several group exhibitions, including at Galerie John Ferrère and the Palais des Expositions of the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Her permanent installation Trilogie is visible in the park of Château des deux Amants in Normandy.
