The Galerie Eva Vautier is delighted to present, for the first time, a solo exhibition by the artist Jeanne Susplugas.
The Galerie Eva Vautier is delighted to present, for the first time, a solo exhibition by the artist Jeanne Susplugas. This artist of international renown occupies the gallery throughout the summer, with, at the heart of the exhibition, an immersive virtual reality installation. Born in 1974 in Montpellier and a graduate in art history from the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Jeanne Susplugas has, since the 2000s, developed a resolutely committed approach that questions the multiple forms of confinement — whether physical, mental or social. Through her work, she explores the relations and distortions of the individual with themself and with others, in an obsessive and dysfunctional world. Her work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions around the world: the KW (Berlin), the Villa Médicis (Rome), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Le Fresnoy – Studio National, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne, the Musée de Grenoble, as well as at major events such as the Alexandria Biennale, Chroniques-Biennale des imaginaires numériques and the Festival Images de Vevey. At the centre of the exhibition: I WILL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD, a virtual reality work that invites visitors to an immersive experience. This project offers a unique introspective journey that confronts the viewer with their own perceptual limits and questions our relationship with life and death. With detachment, coherence and precision, Jeanne Susplugas creates a personal universe using a wide range of media. At the crossroads of drawing, sculpture and new technologies, her unique approach produces an aesthetic that is seductive in appearance but quickly unsettling and grating. Jeanne Susplugas’s works are in numerous prestigious collections, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the MUDAC (Lausanne), the Bass Museum (Miami), the Kunsthalle Detroit, and several FRAC. © Jeanne Susplugas, I will sleep when I’m dead (clock). Interview conducted in Paris on 31 May 2025, between Jeanne Susplugas and Claudine Grammont. CG: Each of your exhibitions tells a story. What story does All Insomniacs Please Raise Your Right Hand tell, and which work serves as the foreword? JS: The idea of the exhibition revolves around my virtual reality piece I Will Sleep When I’m Dead, which is a visual and mental wandering through the brain, within our thoughts. This project began following discussions with a neuroscientist at the Institut Pasteur. How to try to understand this great mystery that is the brain, and how ideas are born. Drawing on scientific imaging, I began making portraits that I call “neuro-portraits”. They form the starting point of a virtual reality experience that questions what the brain generates — and above all how, at times, one might manage to stop it from functioning, particularly at night, hence its title. The pieces I show in the exhibition are all linked to this project, whether they come before or after its making, in 2020. What interests me is pulling threads, starting from…
