Margaux Derhy

Margaux Derhy was born in France from a French mother and a Moroccan father before establishing herself in London, where she studied at Central Saint Martins and then received her MA Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2021. She currently lives and works between London, Paris and her Safe Place in a Berber village by the sea.

Using paintings, drawings, sculptures, embroideries, collaborative projects with craftpersons and recently video, she creates artworks that she perceives as soft remedies to personal trauma of love and loss.  

She attended several residencies including Studio Kura in Fukuoka, Japan (2018) or Greatmore Studios in Cape Town, South Africa (2017) and is running the Massa Stories residency in Morocco since 2019. She is included in the Soho House Collection and was selected for the Dentons Art Prize 2020.  

Her work has been shown in a number of exhibitions. Some of the most recent ones include: Spring Agency show, Paris (2021); Aora III by Aora Space, London (2021); Rongulaire by Tatiss, Lyon (2020); TwentyTwenty Women by The Artistellar, online (2020); Ddessin Art Fair, Paris (2020); Sunday Art Fair, London (2019) with A.Romy Gallery or Investec Art Fair, Cape Town (2018).

A complete CV is available at margauxderhy.com/bio.

Intimacy, grief, healing – my work deals with these subjects which, although so central to much of contemporary film, photography and literature, are I find strangely absent from contemporary painting.

The works for the RCA2021 online exhibition, completed during the past two years, explore the continued fragility of our relationships and the impact on our inner self. How we protect our relationships with other human beings and how we deal with the consequences of break ups or the deaths of loved ones, are all questions I believe crucial for our personal future and which has become even more relevant during this pandemic.

I am primarily a painter but during my education time at the Royal College, I have extended my practice to embroidery, ceramic, blown glass and more recently video. It seems to me that becoming multidisciplinary bears witness to my desire to have an intense and curious engagement with the transitioning world around us.

In my paintings, I try to give form to emotions that manifest from other realms and dimensions beyond the domains of everyday life. My imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence — life and death, isolation and connection, and love and loss — and is realized through oil painting layers of cold and contrasting colors.

In my other works, I am first looking for experimentation challenge and the opportunity to share my imagery differently. I really wanted to collaborate with people (from craftsmen for the embroideries and blown glass to artists for the animated video) and feel this exploration has enabled me to express a new gradient in my emotive and spiritual spectrum.

By developing a personal work around self-mythology, surrealism and fantasy and by playing with perception, I propose a pictorial work that is somehow a tribute to companions that we meet and lose on the road of life.