Eva Jospin, sculptor of forests and follies, elected to the Academy of Fine Arts

With Eva Jospin, 49 years old and with an ardent passion for sculpture, elected this Wednesday, December 18, 2024 under the Dome, the Academy of Fine Arts is getting a serious facelift and bringing to the top a French artist with both critical and critical success. and popular. All summer, at the invitation of Catherine Pgard, the former president of Versailles, she fascinated visitors to the Orangerie at Versailles with her Silk Roommonumental embroidered suite of 350 m² originally imagined for the 2021 Dior fashion show and which runs over 107 m (the Bayeux tapestry, embroidered in XI^e century, is 68.30 m by 50 cm high). Until November 24, as part of the 60^e Venice Biennale, she recreated her world of illusions and reliefs, niches, arched passages and embroidery, at Palazzo Fortuny with “Selva”, an almost reclusive installation on the ground floor of the Venetian palace.

Against all the predictions which favored Pascal Convert, the erudite artist who created a marvelous glazed library in Chaumont-sur-Loire, the Academy is once again putting the fair sex in the spotlight. The election of Eva Jospin is in the wake of Catherine Meurisse, 44 years old, comic book author elected on June 15, 2020 and officially installed in the Drawing section in November 2022, painters with a strong temperament, Tania Mouraud and Nina Childress, elected in May 2024, by the filmmaker, painter and comic book author Marjane Satrapi in the Cinema and audiovisual section in February 2024, of Valérie Belin, elected in January 2024, after the warriors Dominique Issermann and Françoise Huguier, in chair VI of the photography section, recently created chair, of the artist of poetry in all its forms, Anne Poirier, elected in 2021 and installed in October 2022. « I am breaking the famous glass ceiling with my sisters who are already installed »Eva Jospin tells us directly, without hiding her pride.

Leading woman behind her Jane Austen-style ringlets, Eva Jospin eagerly takes chair I in the sculpture section, previously occupied by Jean Cardot (1930-2020). Her election brings to the venerable institution a freshness which comes as much from the forests that she sculpted in cardboard as from her imagination nourished by childhood, the history of art and her love for Italy. This resident of the Villa Medici in Rome in 2016-2017 has already demonstrated her temperament and ambition with her major commission in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre in 2016, Panoramaadventure and first worn by the Noirmonts. She prepared it hard, pregnant, in her freezing workshop in the southern suburbs of Paris. Then she confirmed it with her tower sculpted in cardboard at Montmajour Abbey (Cenotaph2020), project supported by Philippe Bénaval, then president of the Center des monuments nationaux (CMN) and now Culture advisor to the Élysée.

Determined, feminine and anxious, Eva Jospin has created lasting works through the encounters and crushes she has created. At the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, at the invitation of its pioneering director Chantal Colleu-Dumond, a concrete cavern that nature must cover and hide (Madness2015). At the Beaupassage in Paris, as part of the “One building, One work” program (La Traversée, 2018), thanks to the support of his collector and friend, Laurent Dumas, the man behind the Pointe des Arts which will open at the end of 2026 on the ‘Seguin Island, « who rethought the presence of works in architecture, which seems obvious today, but which was not when he started »she tells us. And in Nantes (The Passage2019). In 2022, she inaugurated a permanent installation designed as a winter garden in Piazza del Liberty in Milan (Microclima).

Discovered by the late gallery owner Suzanne Tarasiève, whose young successors she continues to support, she is now the royal asset of the Galleria Continua which, from San Gimignano in Cuba, from Les Moulins near Coulommiers to Beijing, has the art of reinventing exhibition spaces and to refresh views on its artists.

Now his CV is impressive. From the Palais de Tokyo to Paris (Inside2014), at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in 2018. From the Museum Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern in 2019, to the Hayward Gallery in London in 2020. From the Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch (Paper Tales2021), at the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris (Galleria2021), large-scale demonstration which was a triumph with a more than enthusiastic audience. From the Thalie Foundation in Brussels (Panorama2023) and at the Palais des Papes in Avignon which she knew how to invest with tact and strength (Palazzo2023).

As provided for in the statutes, this election will be subject to the approval of the President of the Republic, Protector of the Academy. The sculpture section is now made up of seven members: Claude Abeille, Brigitte Terziev, Pierre-Edouard, Jean Anguera, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Anne Poirier and Eva Jospin. The election of Fabrice Hyber in 2018, of Jean-Michel Othoniel in 2018, then his triumphant installation with a speech in the rules of the art by Adrien Goetz, gave the green light to a new wave of academics and academicians. Since then, they have been joined in the Painting section by the madman of Rimbaud and Pasolini, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, and the champion of modest arts, Hervé Di Rosa. Also note the election of Catherine Francblin, pen of ArtPress and biographer of Niki de Saint Phalle and Bernar Venet, as correspondent of the Sculpture Section. There is no doubt that the sessions will be lively.