MARGAUX PATRY

French-born, London-based figurative painter Margaux Patry explores the unstable boundary between inner and external reality. Working primarily from her own face and body without making conventional self-portraits, she constructs figures that are simultaneously self and other: doubles, characters and altered states through which experiences of fragmentation, masking, trauma and desire can take pictorial form.
Her paintings often appear as fragments of larger, inaccessible scenes. Bodies are cropped, intertwined or partially concealed; gazes turn inward; hands shift ambiguously between tenderness, protection, restraint and threat. Beauty and vulnerability coexist with unease. Drawing on Northern European painting, James Ensor, Jungian psychology and writers including Goethe and Tove Ditlevsen, Patry uses the figure to give form to unstable psychological states, memory and inner experience.
Her work is concerned with unstable forms of selfhood, and with the way memory, trauma and emotion alter the experience of the body. The figures remain psychologically open: never fully self-portrait, never fully fiction, but something in between.
— Text by Dr. Levent Boz, Art Historian

Education
Bachelor in Photography — Gobelins, Paris
MA in Painting — Royal College of Art, London

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