Clémentine de Chabaneix

Clémentine de Chabaneix was born in 1972 in Paris, into a family of artists. She has two children and lives in Montreuil.

From her very birth she was immersed in the world of art, close to her mother, an actress, and her grandparents, the sculptors Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. The many holidays she used to spend in their home and studio awoke in Clémentine a desire to create artefacts and explore the realm of aesthetics. In this most enriching of environments, she soon began to experiment with new techniques, believing then as now, that what really counts is the initial idea, and that a mastery of technique will follow. Borne up by these values, Clémentine de Chabaneix has pursued an artistic career of many facets.

After drama school, she attended the Cours Pradier in Paris, where she took courses in drawing, painting and sculpture. For the following 7 years she went into acting, the stage being an important part of her life even today: she sings in a rock group and writes songs together with her companion, a sound engineer, musician and composer. Very early on, the urge to get to grips with the modeling of raw materials was such that she rented her first studio in a derelict Montreuil factory, where a number of artists were living together in a community. Here she created resin and metal figurines in the style of Pop Surrealism, to be exhibited by art galleries in Paris, Rome and Los Angeles.

Eager to have her own studio, she ended up buying a disused café in Montreuil, where she and her companion worked for months transforming it into a studio and restoring its former splendor. It is a place full of light, opening out onto the neighborhood, inspirational. It is here that the artist began to produce ceramic sculptures in enameled clay, of great poetic strength. In addition, there are drawings which accompany the sculptures or precede them.