AS ABOVE SO BELOW
by Berta Blanca Ivanow & Rosa Nguyen
Sainte Anne Gallery, 44 Rue St Anne 75002, Paris
Tues May 12 — Sun June 7
Vernissage 12 May at 18H
Artist Talk hosted by Lillian Davis May 12 at 17H
The body reveals what thought has forgotten: that we are shaped not only by what we allow to surface, but by what we bury within. Before the vessel, there is pulse—a pulse that stirs from the depths, from clay and earth, from the body’s own interior rhythm. This exhibition considers how that pulse moves into form: how matter becomes a site where sensation, memory and time are recorded.
In AS ABOVE SO BELOW, the practices of Berta Blanca Ivanow and Rosa Nguyen intersect around this question. Both artists work with clay and elemental processes, but from different angles: Ivanow from the perspective of a sculptor negotiating with the human body, Nguyen from that of an observer and assembler of the natural world. Their works propose that sculptural language is born in the “chaos of sensation, in the raw friction between desire and matter,” and that materials carry a “wild intelligence, vibrating through minerals, fingerprints, and the animal memory of the skin”, as Ivanow describes.
For Ivanow, sculpture emerges from an intimate dialogue between body and stoneware. Her embryonic structures, made in high-fired clay, focus less on representation than on the relationship of the object to the human figure—how a form can anchor, echo or displace bodily presence in space. Surfaces register firing techniques that bring together fire, earth, air and water: reduction firings, smoke, combustion, and other procedures that expose the clay to atmospheric change. Each piece becomes “a fragment of a body in potential—an organism in transit,” where cavities, protrusions and points of balance suggest thresholds between interior and exterior, support and vulnerability. Within these forms, rhythm “oscillates between the uterine and the generative, the telluric and the mineral,” articulating an ongoing negotiation between the corporeal and the geological.
Nguyen’s practice approaches matter through collection, preservation and composition. Working with ceramic and glass objects, botanical material and drawing, she constructs tableaux that “materialise the ephemeral,” giving form to processes that are otherwise fleeting: the life of plants, cycles of growth and decay, the passage of celestial bodies. Botanical elements—fresh and dried—are cast, preserved, dipped in liquid porcelain and subjected to sacrificial kiln firings, in which combusted vegetal matter fuses into richly glazed hybrid forms. For AS ABOVE SO BELOW, Nguyen extends this ecopoetic approach into wall-based works combining glass and ceramic pieces made over the last twenty years with drawings on vintage account-book paper, created using rubbings and inks derived from the “blood” of plants, stones and tools from her garden in France. The ledger pages, originally instruments of economic measurement, become a substrate for another kind of accounting: one based on duration, seasonal change and the ongoing exchange between body and environment.
The encounter between the two practices gives a precise shape to the exhibition title. “As above, so below” is not treated as a mystical statement but as a working hypothesis: that what appears on the surface of a work—its glaze, crack, stain or mark—is inseparable from what is buried within it, whether the combustion of plant matter, or the artist’s own gestures and decisions. The phrase echo of passage threads through this process: each work carries “the reverberation of a lived transition, the trace of a physical or emotional shift, the subtle memory of a metamorphosis still perceptible,” describes Ivanow.
At Sainte Anne Gallery these works establish a field where tangible and intangible, body and nature, East and West are in active relation rather than opposed categories. Ivanow’s sculptures emphasise the corporeal introduction of the body into sculpture—what it means to treat clay as an extension of skin and weight. Nguyen’s installations, informed by animist and Oriental philosophies, gardening and Ikebana, stage an “orientation towards the cosmological,” in which domestic and cosmic scales are folded into a single, carefully composed scene.
Across the exhibition, their works articulate a condition of perpetual passage. Forms appear soft, fragmented, germinal not as fixed symbols but as records of processes that are still unfolding. The fragility of these objects is not only physical; it points to “an archaic wisdom: that of the world before language, of the body that knew instinctively,” and to energies that remain partially buried like a fermented seed. The exhibition proposes that by attending to these material negotiations—between clay and fire, plant and glaze, ledger and stain—art can return to what it once was: a way of knowing the sacred, of encountering untamed nature through primordial contact.
A series of untitled Polaroids by Marco Gasser (b. 1989)—Swiss multidisciplinary artist known for his photographic documentation of landscapes and material transformation—captures intimate close-ups of Berta Blanca Ivanow’s stoneware sculptures. These exposures reveal the works’ tactile surfaces—cracks, smoke marks, firing traces—as living records of process and elemental exchange.
