Sophie Zénon

Artist photographer, Sophie Zénon first gained attention at the end of the 1990s for her delicate silver prints of landscapes made in Mongolia between 1996 and 2009, a country which fascinates her for the intimate relationship of its inhabitants to nature and to the spiritual forces that animate it. Marked by this experience as much in life as in art, Sophie Zénon today articulates her work around recurring themes – memory, history, loss, the passage of time – often evoked through the relationship of the body to the landscape .

Photographs, reactivated archives, artist's books, videos, installations, but also glass engravings, monotypes, woven and modeled stampings... Sophie Zénon's work unfolds in a polyphonic narration, revealing the important place accorded to the artist to experimentation, materiality and the hybridization of mediums sometimes carried out with the complicity of art artisans. From her practice are born organic, vibrant and poetic works, guided by the notions of fragility, impermanence and the breath of life, where "the present is a receptacle of time and accumulated stories (...) that she crystallizes through the trace, the metaphor and the marvelous, giving them a form that is renewed each time" (*).

At the same time, since the 2000s, she has been developing plastic research on gesture and know-how in artistic professions, with a questioning of the making of our heritage - whether intimate or collective - on its representation and its transmission, considering the gesture as a vector of social bond.

Sophie Zénon is represented by Galerie XII in Paris and Los Angeles.

(*) Christine Coste, Sophie Zénon, L'Œil, May 2023