06/10/2026
Meet the artist ahead of our upcoming show "Près d'Elle"
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F***y Irina is a French artist of Malagasy and Martinican descent, born in Bondy in 2000. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she presented her first solo exhibition, Chimères, at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Abidjan in 2023, following a residency at the ceramics centre in Grand-Bassam, and won the À première vue prize in 2025. She now develops her work at the IOTA Lecourbe studios in Paris.
Her work unfolds like a tale. Through drawing, pastel, painting, textile and ceramics, she tells stories peopled with hybrid landscapes, characters and objects, where the fantastic meets the intimate. Her figures are nomads and hermits, their bodies sheltered from the gaze of others, their skin worn like fur. In this stillness, she explores her own metamorphoses and the many bodies she has inhabited, while bringing questions of rootedness and the re-enchantment of space into the frame.
Since 2022, she has been making ceramic cards, shaped like playing cards for a game whose rules remain unknown. Some are smooth and glazed, glossy or matte, sometimes iridescent. On others, the heads of animals appear, a wolf, a fox, a bear, a lion, half revealed and still held within the clay. She turns shells into fossils and makes relics of what has passed through her. Somewhere between the fable and the self, her work asks what we carry within us, what transforms us, and what, quietly, keeps us company.
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Looking forward to welcoming you at the gallery to present F***y Irina’s work alongside Yanma Fofana's.
“Près d’Elle”, curated by Louise Thurin, Opening October 14th, 7 - 10 pm, in the presence of the artists
📍The Bridge Gallery, 19 Rue Louise-Emilie de la Tour d’Auvergne, 75009 Paris
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Credits: Brigitte
