Marie Hazard: “The shadow that weaves within me”

MARIE HAZARD
THE SHADOW THAT WEAVES WITHIN ME

18 SEPTEMBER > 1 NOVEMBER 2025
OPENING 18 SEPTEMBER

“I ́m looking for my own space,”1 declared Magdalena Abakanowicz, the great
Polish artist who brought textile art to the avant-garde in the 1960s,
transcending scale and the classical materials then used in what was known
in the West as “tapestry art.” Seeking her own space, finding her place,
inventing other ways of inhabiting the world: this is also the goal of the works
of French artist Marie Hazard. The word “space” here takes on several
meanings. First, it expresses a will for affirmation: in an art world long
dominated by men, where textiles were relegated to the margins of art
history, it is a matter of fully occupying the field of creation. It also refers to
the search for a place of emancipation—a “room of one’s own”—that weaving
makes possible, taking shape as a refuge, a protective envelope, an intimate
territory molded by gesture. Finally, space more literally designates what the
works produce in their own materiality: a volume that is inhabited, traversed,
shared. In Marie Hazard’s work, these three dimensions—political, intimate,
and physical—overlap in a practice where textile becomes architecture,
breath, and memory.

Weaving, for Marie Hazard, is not merely about producing a decorative
surface: it is about building a place. Every stretched, knotted, twisted thread,
every chosen material, every repeated gesture is a way of inhabiting space,
of patiently constructing it on the loom, with the strength of arms and legs.
The textile thus becomes architecture—a flexible, mobile, intimate
architecture—a language of construction, a medium capable of structuring a
space while letting it breathe. By questioning the autonomy of the work and
its subordination to the wall, the artist embarks for the first time in this
exhibition on conceptual explorations of three-dimensionality. Her pieces
detach from the wall to assert themselves in space: they become panels,
columns, buttresses, portals. The aim here is not to construct closed spaces,
but to open, create passages, porous thresholds that invite passage. For it is
in the concrete and symbolic construction of a space of one’s own, a space
of freedom and creation, that Marie Hazard truly engages herself. If a place—
in the anthropological sense of the term—is a point of reference for
individuals, a site imbued with history and a stage for social relationships, the
spaces that Marie Hazard’s works transport us to tend instead to unsettle our
certainties. She proposes an entirely different experience: one of solitude,
wandering, and personal introspection.