MORGANE ELY

Born in 1995 and based in Paris, Morgane Ely first studied at the Beaux-Arts de Nancy before joining the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she specialized in printmaking, particularly screen printing. A six-month stay in Japan marked a decisive turning point: introduced to woodblock carving, she brought this technique back to France and immediately hybridized it with her screen-printing expertise. By moving away from the traditional codes of mokuhanga, she developed matrices with pop, irreverent subjects, a body of work quickly noticed. She was awarded the Révélation Emerige Prize in 2023, along with a residency at Villa Noailles.

Morgane Ely’s practice unfolds as a play of tensions where feminisms, hyper-femininities, and popular imaginaries meet without hierarchy. Her pin-ups pilot alien spacecraft, her media icons move between vulnerability and strength, and this ambiguity becomes the very engine of her work. She draws from mass culture images, from screenshots to paparazzi photographs, stretching them into the long duration of carving. The precision of the gouge, the vibrating halftones, and moiré effects pull the still image toward a near-luminous agitation, as if the screen lingered within the wood. By reinvesting figures such as Suki from Fast & Furious, the heroines of Twilight, the Kardashians, or pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, she lends these hyper-mediated representations a singular, almost ceremonial value. Combining the delicacy of an ancestral technique with overexposed icons, she blurs distinctions between art and entertainment, politics and glamour, high culture and pop culture. Her works question how images shape our behaviors while asserting a clear freedom from the norms and moral frameworks that attempt to define them.