Clara Tournay

Clara Tournay (born in 1996) is a French artist working between Paris and the Vosges region. Her work, blending sculpture, installation, and painting, explores memory, sensitivity, and temporality. Specializing in art history at the École du Louvre in 2023, she has received several awards, including the Puvis de Chavannes and Dauphine Prizes (2025) and the Paris I Contemporary Art Prize (2022), the year of her first solo exhibition at the Crous des Beaux-Arts.

Her projects are developed within public and private institutions, and some of her works have entered the collection of the City of Pontoise. In 2025, she is preparing a residency in Mexico with the French Institute and the French Consulate General, as well as a new exhibition at the Salon des Beaux-Arts.

Clara Tournay's work unfolds like a slow incantation of the world. Her pieces, poised between matter and mirage, seem to be in perpetual metamorphosis. In her compositions, the world appears to be reborn. She explores that moment of transition where one state glides into another, as if painting and sculpture were recording the transition rather than its culmination. This attention to the threshold aligns with a form of magical realism grounded in an expanded perception of reality, where natural processes, origin stories, and scientific logic converge.

In sculpture, she continues this interpretation. Stone, glass, or polycarbonate react to heat, weight, or torsion according to their own laws. The folds, cracks, or expansions are the result of a process rather than a gesture, inscribing time within the material itself.

This relationship to transformation finds a natural echo in the experiments of Gerda Gruber, where the final form bears witness to a
internal story rather than a formal intention.

Thus, Clara Tournay's work questions what escapes the eye. An exploration of the threshold, of the in-between, of the passage from the formless to the tangible. It illuminates the phenomena that work on matter and offers the viewer an experience where time, memory, and perception intersect.
come together.