Exhibition

At a time when textile creations are gaining renewed recognition, the gallery is pleased to present a unique exhibition: a dialogue between the historic Ge Bei works shown at the Centre Pompidou in 2003 and the latest pieces by the artist Clarence Guéna.

The Ge Ba, assembled by Chinese textile workers in the mid-20th century, are made from scraps of clothing—children’s garments, workwear, everyday fabrics. Glued, layered, and recomposed, they become vibrant surfaces where traces remain: a floral pattern, an indigo blue, a nearly faded inscription. These are not merely assemblages, but condensed fragments of silent lives—textile memories.

Facing them, Clarence Guéna also works with memory. His Sous-papiers begin with embroidered canvases often imbued with domestic and emotional significance. He covers and veils them, then allows fragments of their worn motifs—eroded by time and gaze—to re-emerge. The gesture is both gentle and decisive. What appears is never whole—only fragments, like a memory that persists.

In both practices, the act is one of reuse and recomposition:
not creating from nothing, but from what has already been lived.

At a distance, these works also converse through their contexts of creation. On one side, collective, repeated gestures rooted in a fragile economy and shared time. On the other, an independent contemporary practice shaped by the histories of others. Together, they trace a form of embodied abstraction.