Pop culture, famous icons, dramas… The work of Morgane Ely is composed of a myriad of images gleaned from films and social networks, the kind that capture your attention, imprint on your retinas, and trigger an immediate emotion. A dizzying contemporary iconography far removed from the themes that usually constitute the artist’s technique.

By manually engraving her plywood board, the artist reverses the temporality of her subjects. The image transitions from the notion of instant consumption, of immediate dissemination, to the status of a unique piece, an object destined to anchor itself in a space. The pixel transforms into a texture, the photographic blur into artisanal craftsmanship. As if the matrix obtained by the artist becomes the original of these images imprinted in our memories since adolescence.

Morgane Ely was born in 1995 in Hayange, Lorraine, France. She graduated from the Beaux-Arts of Nancy and later from the Beaux-Arts of Paris, where she learned screen printing. She spent six months at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, where she was trained in woodblock printing and engraving by masters Akira Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Hirai. Ely won the 42nd Takifuji Art Award and the Printmaking Prize at the Sarcelles Biennale in 2021, the Rose Taupin – Dora Bianka Prize in 2022, and most recently, the Villa Noailles Prize at the latest Emerige Revelations. This was followed by a residency at Villa Noailles, where she will have a solo exhibition at the Ancien Evéché (the Old Bishopric) in Toulon in 2025.