Curated by Ygaël Attali

Lumière Sculptée (Sculpted Light) marks Émilie Lemardeley’s first museum exhibition and a significant milestone in the artist’s career. Following several years of collaboration with Galerie Philia, including her acclaimed solo exhibition in Bordeaux in 2025 and the presentation of her work in Floral Echoes, Odes to Mapplethorpe in Zurich, the exhibition brings her sculptural universe into the institutional setting of the Mandet Museum.

Presented within an eighteenth century hôtel particulier, the exhibition brings together a selection of sculptures in blown glass and bronze that explore light not as an effect, but as a living material, one that grows, circulates, and continually reshapes our perception. Rather than depicting nature, Lemardeley’s works embody its underlying forces: growth, metamorphosis, fluidity, and expansion.

Conceived in close dialogue with the architecture of the Mandet Museum, the exhibition develops a relational curatorial approach in which sculpture, light, and space become inseparable. Each work responds to the building’s volumes, natural light, and historical character, transforming the museum into an environment of shifting reflections, shadows, and sensory encounters.

Featuring works from the artist’s major series, including Dryades, Posidoni, Germs, and Mouvances, Sculpted Light invites visitors to experience sculpture as a living process rather than a fixed object. More than an exhibition of artworks, it proposes a slower way of looking, one in which perception unfolds through movement, attention, and time.