portraits
Portrait
Design

Laureline Galliot - first decade retrospective exhibition in Saint-Etienne

My pieces are manifestos that teach us to accept the deformed.

The vrai ou FAUVE exhibition, which opens in September at the Cité du Design in Saint-Etienne, looks back at the first ten years of designer Laureline Galliot, a former resident at the Villa Kujoyama in Japan. 

Published on 20/09/2023

5 min

Laureline Galliot was born in 1986 and spent part of her childhood and adolescence as a dancer, as part of a troupe. Attracted as much by movement as by the other elements that surround her in space such as sets and costumes, she went on to train in textiles at the Oliviers de Serres school. It was the start of a highly intimate relationship with colour that she has cultivated ever since, transposing it to the world of industrial design. Laureline Galliot goes against the grain of a discipline that focuses primarily on volume, and sometimes considers colour to be a matter of 'finishing'. She sculpts her objects directly in colour. She uses digital tools to achieve this, enabling her to work on her pieces at true scale. She uses a wide range of techniques to give life to what she calls her "coloured magma". 

Both painter and designer, Laureline Galliot uses digital tools such as the iPad and virtual reality in her work. These tools allow her to create her work instinctively, without worrying about realism or preconceived models. In this respect, she reveals the influence of Fauvism, concerned as it was with how the painter's gestures, emotions and affect are directly reflected in the colour. Her many self-portraits, in which she willingly depicts herself surrounded by her most iconic objects, bear witness to a practice in which the creation of objects is also a study and projection of the self. Connected by their design and production techniques, her canvases and sculptures are painted, modelled and then digitally printed, using a method that strives for perfection of gesture. Paradoxically, however, it also embodies a total rejection of any conceptual rigour. 

Laureline Galliot's works, striking in their inventiveness and chromatic exuberance, can be found in some of the world's leading collections, from the CNAP to the Swiss Institute in New York, Mudam in Luxembourg, the SEEDS Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. Her work will soon be showcased at the Cité du design in Saint-Etienne, with around thirty pieces that retrace a career spanning almost ten years. Laureline Galliot, who has frequently worked with artisans in the past, notably during her residency at Villa Kujoyama in 2017, will be collaborating for the occasion with Benaud, a Lyon-based specialist in moirage. It's an opportunity to inaugurate the new cycle of monographic exhibitions Présent>< Futur, launched by the Cité du design and dedicated to the emerging French and European scene. 

  • 2012

    2012

    Graduates from ENSCI - Les Ateliers.

  • 2017

    2017

    Residency at Villa Kujoyama.

  • 2018

    2018

    Dried and Soft, solo exhibition at Balsan.

  • 2023

    2023

    vrai ou FAUVE, at the Cité du Design in Saint-Etienne.

L'institut français, LAB