The French artist Pauline-Rose Dumas, who took part in the EIB Institute’s Artists Development Programme in 2022/2023, has been commissioned to make new work for the café space at Luxembourg Art Week. Her installation, Café Pauline, continues her research into the combination of wrought-iron sculptures and textile works.

         —     Special projects, Luxembourg Art Week
                 09-12 November 2023

Pauline-Rose Dumas (Paris-1996) is a French textile artist who integrates wrought iron and drawing into her large-scale installations. She graduated with honors from the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2022) and Chelsea College of Arts (London, 2019). In 2022, she took part in the European Investment Bank’s residency program for emerging artists in Luxembourg, under the mentorship of Tatiana Trouvé, at the end of which two sculptures became part of the EIB collection in 2023. 

The artist’s installations always reflect a relationship between the exhibition space and the studio from which they emerge. The deliberately exaggerated dimensions of these motifs and forms open up a more personal dimension specific to the artist: the witnessing of the universe of what is composed and transformed, in the intimacy of the creative process. 

In this space without a picture rail, the sculpture acts as a wall. Here, the installation is the surface that delimits the interior and exterior of Café Pauline, acting as an invitation to pass through to the other side of the works on display. The public is invited to enter a vocabulary of forms that transits from the human scale to the scale of the site’s architecture. Large textile patchworks present motifs that spill out: stains, fluids, imprints, forms that have a hold on the void, that escape control to surprise with their freedom. 

The sculpture of wrought-iron elements is presented here as a form of writing in space, like a line of drawing criss-crossing the pages of gigantic steel notebooks. These free lines that punctuate the installation represent the thread of thought, the power of speech, of what is exchanged in a public place, a café, as well as what is silently annotated in a notebook.