Pauline Ohrel
b. 1967, Paris · Lives and works in Paris
Born in 1967, Pauline Ohrel lives and works in Paris and Bréhat. After university studies in Paris and London and then eleven years at the Paris bar, during which she also pursued an artistic activity, she has devoted herself exclusively to sculpture since 2002.
A sculptor of the senses, Pauline Ohrel seeks to capture unstable balances and fleeting moments. She puts her gift for contemplating humanity at the service of this quest: to see and reveal the ephemeral harmonies where power is revealed in human fragility.
For her, sculpture represents “a renewed daily adventure, a source of emotions that are sensual, aesthetic, intellectual, or memorial. It is about capturing the fleeting nature of attitudes, the fragility of the moment when the body transcends itself and becomes grace.”
Although Pauline Ohrel's elegant silhouettes and expressive forms are not all explicitly figurative, they always draw their strength from human emotions, feelings, and postures fueled by pure energy.
Rooted in a modernity that does not intend to sacrifice itself to the demands of a sometimes disembodied contemporaneity, Pauline Ohrel works for a sculpture that answers more to the senses than to ideas, to the heart than to the head.
Having worked successfully with traditional materials such as bronze and plaster for several years, she has also developed a technique using wire mesh that lends this material a striking nobility. The projection of seemingly moving forms into space, the interplay of inverted perspectives and anamorphosis afforded by the material's transparency, leads us to a unique balance between volume and lightness, transparency and substance, figuration and evocation.
“In my work with wire mesh, I explore the boundaries between drawing and volume. The ambiguity afforded by the material's transparency, by playing on perspectives and perceptions, erases or suggests the outer form. The suggestion, like the subtlety of feelings and movements, requires the active participation of the viewer/actor.”
Pauline Ohrel's unique approach engages the viewer's astonishment and imagination with a force and weight that a few grams of metal would not suggest.
