Marie Bonfils
Marie Bonfils has a beef with language. Her sculptures evoke the viewer’s affect, a direct response that often turns into reflections on subtle sexuality and gendered roleplay. Her sculptural practice begins before words: in the touch, the gesture, the physical memory stored in the hands. Working across textiles, plaster, steel and casting, Bonfils builds from hunch rather than concept: the material is trusted to know something the mind does not. Fabrics chosen for their proximity to skin — underwear, raincoats, latex — forms filled with sand or sawdust until they carry weight like bodies do. Plaster pulled from moulds that began as clay, as pressure, as contact.
Originally trained as a goldsmith, Bonfils brings both precision and an openness to surprise, a readiness to follow what the hand propose, to her sculptures. The work moves between the feminine and something not yet named: not speaking on behalf of gender, but exploring the images that live between its positions. Affect here operates as a spatial and material force: beneath consciousness, prior to language, an intensity rather than a narrative. The material carries it. It lingers, trembles, rouses.
The body in her work is always specific. Always hers. And in that specificity, something opens. This text included.
Marie Bonfils (b. 1978, Copenhagen) graduated from Malmö Art Academy in 2015. She has been included in institutional group exhibitions at ARoS, DK, and holds work in the public art collection of the City of Lund, commissioned by Lunds Konsthall.
Selected Artworks
Biography
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