Born in 1998 in France
Lives and works in Paris, France

In her work, Marion Chaillou combines sculpture and painting to explore the family and social dynamics at work in the history of Western furniture. Drawing on this lexical field, she creates wooden sculpture-socles that reveal the lack of neutrality of these objects, as well as the underlying structures of domination and power. The artist places paintings, miniatures of vernacular and consumable images in gouache, inside or against the furniture. Juxtaposed in this way and caught in these structures, they refer to the status of the reproduced image. Marion Chaillou selects the photos she chooses to paint from those she has taken and received. Her gouaches examine the place of the subject in painting and the illusion of a self-narrative in an age of overexposure to media images. Because of their small size, they evoke the idea of secrecy that is characteristic of domestic furniture, particularly for women. They inhabit deserted pieces of furniture that seem to have lost their uses and users, objects that are ‘so perfectly domesticated that they would have thought they had always been created for their sole use’. (Les Choses, Georges Perec, 1965)

Marion Chaillou graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2023 with a degree in painting from Tim Eitel and in woodwork from Pascal Aumaître. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in France, notably in 2024 at Villa Benkemoun (Arles), 100% l’expo à la Villette (Paris), Cité Falguière (Paris), Poush Manifesto (Clichy, 2022), Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac with Jeune Création (Pantin, 2021) and at the 51st edition of Novembre à Vitry (2021). In 2021, she took part in the Sigg Art Foundation residency in Le Castellet (France).