PARIS.- Winner of the Prix Découverte des Amis du Palais de Tokyo in 2014, Sara Favriau (born in 1983, lives in Paris) deploys a monumental, poetic sculpture, made of cleats of sculpted wood, assembled into cabincontainers, in which several artists have been invited to exhibit.

Sara Favriau is attached to the idea of prolongation, creating bridges between form and content. She appropriates classic production techniques and extends them: moulding transforms blisters into anthropomorphic bas-reliefs, a sculpture of manufactured cleats sketches out the structure of the cabins, the marquetry of layers of plywood generates the pattern of a Mashrabiya. "What causes the work to exist is this open door, freeing it from any description, wavering between form and meaning." 3

Recently, the artist has begun a sculptural work using wooden cleats taken from the construction industry. She cuts, sculpts then assembles them to create hamlets of cabins with varied dimensions, from the furnishings to the dwelling itself. "I’m ennobling ‘construction’ using simple procedures and gestures. Objects become hybrid, between structure and ornament, offering a new interpretation phase, beyond the production process." 4

For her solo show at Palais de Tokyo, Sara Favriau is deploying 2,000 plain spruce cleats in the space of the Wilson gallery, which have been sculpted and assembled into an archipelago of five cabin-containers, linked by footbridges. And yet these cabins are impractical, built just below the human scale, forming a closed circuit, inciting the public to explore her work via mental projection.

Sara Favriau is inviting several artists to exhibit as part of her installation.
"Collaboration is not just about connecting individuals, it means getting them to work together, and opening up a conversation. Hence my decision to play the diversity card, to check out other creative fields and make them frequent each other." 5

As both pieces and settings, the cabins introduce a reflection about demonstration. While the hatched outer walls of the work keep signs of the work done on them, the interiors are machine-made, sober and linear, like ‘white cubes’ to host the works of other artists. The overall piece dialogues via transparency with the works it receives, most of which are new. Sara Favriau is subsequently pursuing this reflection by reactivating an exhibition curatorship by proposing, with Cécile Welker, a further session of invitations, during a second phase of shows.

"Collecting objects, accumulating, hand-cutting cleats, desystemising so as to re-systemise, deconstructing so as to reconstruct symbolically. There is real labour in long-term production: temporality in the making of a work, but also in its interpretation, in the discovery of a work suggested by an elliptic narrative, present within the pieces." 6

Sara Favriau (born in 1983 in Paris, lives in Paris) graduated in 2007 from the école Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 2014, she was awarded the Prix Découverte des Amis du Palais de Tokyo and the Best Installation Prize at the YIA Art Fair.

That same year, Galerie Maubert (Paris) put on her first solo show, "La houle se déroulant au fracas de la coque (…), je sabrais l’écume (With the swell unfurling to the din of the hull (…), I sabred the spray)".

Curators: Sara Favriau and Cécile Welker

"Even if the act of creation is an isolated, personal one, for me, part of the creative process is about collaborations and encounters." 1

"The cabin is a fantasy sight. A shelter for the projection of a singular daily existence, in which intuition and thought are expressed." 2


1, 2 Sara Favriau’s statements.
3, 4, 5 Sara Favriau’s statement. 6 Cécile Welker’s statement.