Portrait
Zélie Rouby began working with clay as a child in a sculpture workshop. At the age of 18, she began an apprenticeship in ceramics at the Lycée Henry Moisand in Longchamp, Burgundy, where she remained for 3 years. In 2008, she took a year's training at the Maison de la Céramique in Dieulefit. During this training, she met designer Guillaume Bardet, who invited her to take part in his "l'usage des jours" project. In 2011, they were awarded the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Intelligence of the Hand®. In 2012, she began exhibiting her own work, and in 2014 took part in the Vallauris International Biennial, winning the "Poison poisson" prize for artists under 35, as well as the Prix jeune créateur from Ateliers d'art de France. His fish cross the Atlantic, to be exhibited at the SOFA show in Chicago. In 2018, his pieces from the Organique series will be exhibited in New York's Soho district.
"Since the beginning, what nourishes my work is the theme of the living. With the coiling technique, the work of form, material, and color, I try to give life to this mineral matter, stoneware."
Zélie Rouby navigates freely between ceramic references and pictorial inspirations, mixing shaping and throwing, figuration and abstraction. The sobriety of her forms is matched by their pure colors and the singular materiality of her works. Zélie Rouby has made a name for herself with her strange compositions of bottles and dead fruit or fish. Silent, they were inspired by still-life paintings, at the crossroads of the formal research of 20th-century artists and the luxurious debauchery of the Dutch of the Grand Siècle. In the "Organique" series, the outer wall of the large pan-formed vases is a soft, smooth skin under the hand, while the interior is covered with those small grains - grog mixed with slip - that are his signature. The container becomes the primary receptacle, the mother's womb, a moving body with lips that open in a breath: the origins of the pot, treated in a contemporary aesthetic. Maud Grillet galerie terra viva
Lauréate de la récompense Dialogues du Prix Liliane Bettencourt pour l'Intelligence de la Main® 2011
