The Mouth of the Vase / Mathilde Albouy

Spotlight on Mathilde Albouy's first solo exhibition in Italy.

At Spazio Sassetti in Florence, a seductive, dangerous game unfolds, hovering on the threshold between courtship and predation. Mathilde Albouy’s practice, imbued with feminist sci-fi narratives, interrogates and destabilises the binary structures underpinning Western society. She alters forms and materials, revealing how seemingly neutral elements may conceal violent and oppressive frameworks.

Sinuous presences traverse the room with sleek, black, cutting bodies. They inhabit the space in a constant oscillation between abstraction and figuration. The environment is flooded with light streaming through large windows, establishing an ongoing dialogue with the exterior. The Mouth of the Vase, Albouy’s first solo exhibition in Italy, presents a series of sculptural works in wood and bronze, produced in collaboration with Giardini Studios. The exhibition unfolds within the Renaissance-era galleries of Spazio Sassetti, in Florence. It is precisely this historically charged urban context that leads Albouy, for the first time, to define her works as “statues”, a clear reference to the Florentine sculptural tradition, marked by monumentality and by immobile presences embedded within complex architectures, charged with a latent dynamism that exists only in potential. Once icons of power and symbolic authority in public space, these forms are now translated through a contemporary lens that grants authority to the work through its presence rather than its representation. The exhibition’s title itself evokes a liminal condition between body and architecture, interior and exterior, a threshold that simultaneously connects and separates. The works recall both the formal and philosophical Japanese principles of ikebana: compositions of cut flowers, branches, and leaves in which asymmetry and emptiness find a point of convergence, existing in a state of equilibrium.

“The Mouth of the Vase”

Engaging with a space as historically and architecturally defined as Spazio Sassetti is inevitable, Albouy responds by moving in opposition to its rational order, proposing elongated, sinuous forms charged with a sexual tension that cuts through the room with a sharp, partially violent motion. Her works manifest as uncanny presences, inhabiting the space and producing a disquieting unease that transforms both the environment and the disoriented viewer’s perception of it. The sculptures exist in a porous condition: uncertain bodies that are difficult to identify, yet strangely familiar. Domestic forms undergo a process of deconstruction that displaces them from their functional logic toward the unrecognisability of their origin. The exhibition path culminates in a series of works reminiscent of the “hairpin”, a recurring motif in the artist’s practice through which she identifies a dual association with feminine ornamentation and bodily control. Suspended between bone and bamboo, these forms assume a totemic presence, like oversized crucifixes, they distort the viewer’s perception of their own body, echoing the religious and political sculptures dispersed throughout the Tuscan city, once the epicentre of the Italian Renaissance.
Edoardo Durante

The Mouth of the Vase / Mathilde Albouy

Credits

Artist: Mathilde Albouy / @mathildealbouy
Venue: Spazio Sassetti / @spaziosassetti @louisalyoncrawford
Supported by: Giardini Studio / @giardini.studios @sofya_simakova
Words : Edoardo Durante / @edo_durante
Editor: Maria Abramenko / @mariabramenko
Junior Editor: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci

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