Morgane Ely: Hostess and Guests

With Morgane Ely, woodcut is not a tool for reproduction but an art form in itself. Her carved plates, shaped through long hours of meticulous work, are not matrices for printing but artworks that bear their own presence. Inked, scored or sprayed in vivid colours, they embody critique in raw, dense and precise form.

For this exhibition at Galerie Prima, Ely presents new engravings conceived as collisions: domestic portraits of Japanese women intersect with tags taken from Parisian streets. These works create friction between two visual systems — one tied to the West’s colonial fantasies of the Orient, the other to the coded, masculine language of urban assertion.

The women, poised in interiors, evoke stereotypes of submission and silence perpetuated in decorative objects and archival imagery. Ely does not repeat these figures but confronts them. Over their polished surfaces she inscribes tags — gestures of ego and territoriality long used to dominate public space, often at the expense of marginalised bodies.

This clash produces displacement: the tag both intrudes upon and reinterprets the frozen image. It interrupts the gaze, unsettling habits of seeing and prompting recognition of political tensions beneath aesthetic surfaces. Ely’s practice thrives on paradox: refinement with transgression, technical precision with popular culture, tradition with détournement.

In her hands, femininity is not fixed but contested terrain. The confrontation between intimacy and the urban, between fantasised image and visual attack, becomes a form of resistance. Ely’s works let images remain complex, impure and vividly alive.