Category: drawing

Everything is a sign in Alexandra Duprez’s work. Her enigmatic pieces are wondrous tales—dreamed, crafted, and at times collaged—where fragments of life dissolve into abstraction.

Alexandra Duprez’s work overflows—off the canvas, across book covers she envelops, onto repurposed cardboard, and beyond what we can grasp of her practice.

Her body of work is diverse, yet held together by a secret, almost silent thread. Within a universe unlike any other, she weaves a wondrous world where dogs, horses, and snakes coexist with humans. Deconstructed and in flux—represented through legs, hands, or eyes—these beings emerge as impenetrable points of consciousness.

This first monograph brings together over a hundred works, carefully selected from a prolific body of art. The book opens with a text by Sophie Kaplan, director of La Criée Contemporary Art Center (Rennes), and is punctuated by a conversation between Alexandra Duprez and Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi (Chose Commune), accompanied by studio photographs taken in Douarnenez.

A tender visual diary spanning ten years, offering glimpses into the artist’s everyday life through drawings inspired by nature, gardening, and her close-knit community.

Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck has been drawing in sketchbooks for as long as she can remember, in the manner of a diary to which she confides her everyday life. A daily practice that mirrors the tender care she gives to her garden, a vibrant place that plays an essential role in her life and artistic practice.

In these sketchbooks, shapes and colours intermingle in a delicate and joyful harmony. It’s her intimate world that Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck reveals in her drawings, many of which are created en plein-air in just a few minutes. The simplicity of grey pencil strokes meets field flowers held in one hand and where familiar faces meet small animals, like Lemon, the canary with whom she lives.

To delve into ten years of notebooks, kept from 2014 to 2024, is to encounter the abundant and multifaceted work of an artist who invites us to observe the ordinary with an insatiable appetite.

An in-depth conversation between Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck and Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi completes the selection of drawings.

A tender visual diary spanning ten years, offering glimpses into the artist’s everyday life through drawings inspired by nature, gardening, and her close-knit community.

Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck has been drawing in sketchbooks for as long as she can remember, in the manner of a diary to which she confides her everyday life. A daily practice that mirrors the tender care she gives to her garden, a vibrant place that plays an essential role in her life and artistic practice.

In these sketchbooks, shapes and colours intermingle in a delicate and joyful harmony. It’s her intimate world that Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck reveals in her drawings, many of which are created en plein-air in just a few minutes. The simplicity of grey pencil strokes meets field flowers held in one hand and where familiar faces meet small animals, like Lemon, the canary with whom she lives.

To delve into ten years of notebooks, kept from 2014 to 2024, is to encounter the abundant and multifaceted work of an artist who invites us to observe the ordinary with an insatiable appetite.

An in-depth conversation between Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck and Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi completes the selection of drawings.

Constance Guisset’s pencil drawings are coloured spectrums and forms that move slowly, almost like ghosts floating across the white, then black, space of the page.

Constance Guisset draws. Oftentimes at the studio, as a starting point for an idea that will turn into a design object or scenography. But drawing also comes along as time stands still, away from any duty or purpose. It is not about drawing at work anymore, but drawing to break free. Corps flottants is a series born out of this spontaneity: it was at the sea that these “ghosts of lockdown”, as Constance Guisset likes to call them, first took shape. This book, deliberately exempt of any text, offers a space of free expression for these pencil drawings. Mischievous and colourful ghosts float and shift throughout the pages, until they become illuminated bodies on pitch black pages. As one puts the book away, the drawings leave an imprint on the vision, like the evidence of a memory that even the motion of the sea cannot completely wipe out.

Table ! is Chose Commune’s first children’s book — where every meal becomes a story for children and adults alike.

Table ! is the very first children’s book published by Chose Commune, offering a joyful dual reading experience for both children and adults.

Set in the vibrant illustrated world of Maggie Cowles, every meal becomes a celebration. Food is more than something we eat — it is memory, comfort, sharing, and storytelling. As the pages turn, children are encouraged to search for a small hidden element within the illustrations, transforming reading into a playful visual game. For adults, these warm and lively scenes echo the feeling of gathering around food: spontaneous meals, shared laughter, and the memories that quietly take shape while cooking together.

“Trois têtes” is a limited edition lithograph by Alexandra Duprez, the painter behind the cover of our book “Jeux de mains”. Born in Douarnenez (Brittany) where she still lives, her unique and distinctive style places the human figure at the centre of her work. This lithograph was printed by Alexandra Duprez herself in collaboration with the Musée de l’Imprimerie de Nantes.

You Smell Different But You’re Just the Same is a series of paintings by Iris de Moüy, produced over a span of fifteen years.

While sorting through her archives, Iris de Moüy came upon countless drawings of her daughter, made from the moment of her birth, alongside paintings produced throughout those years.
“I simply watched this child grow by drawing her.” Her words say it all: gestures and postures inscribed in early childhood, later recognized as enduring traces of who we are and who we become. In this series, Iris de Moüy’s line moves with great tenderness, revealing a bond between mother and child that is at once intimate, familiar, and enigmatic.

Between collages and paper creations, the result of residencies and experiments, Do Insects Play? is a poetic exploration of materials that blends visual art and writing.

The Coup de Crayon collection offers the artists in the fields of painting, drawing or collage a “carte blanche” to imagine a series as a book. “Do Insects Play” is the third volume of the collection.

‘Do Insects Play?’ is an insight into French artist Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck’s playful and mindful practice, one that is frequently informed by the environment in which she finds herself. The artworks contained in this book are a curated selection of soft and vibrant collages from the ongoing series Cocooning  – composed of various found papers, paintings and textiles, along pieces from To End is to Start, a new body of works created out of repurposed cotton fibres and water. The pieces have all been produced during a 2018 – 19 residency in South India where Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck deepened her knowledge and practice of hand papermaking. A short story by the artist is presented alongside the artworks, appearing as a gentle melody dancing throughout the pages.