Léonore Chastagner

Born in Nice (France) in 1992, Léonore Chastagner lives and works in Montpellier.
 
She studied art history at the École du Louvre and continued her studies with a Master's degree at the Sorbonne and later at New York University. During her time in the United States, she began the sculptural work she further developed at Villa Arson, where she earned her MFA in 2022. 
Over the years, she has built a vocabulary of figurative forms centered on the notions of intimacy, interiority, and preservation. Folded clothes, the bedroom, and the gestures of the body are recurring motifs in her work. Her practice hovers at the edge of ethnographic documentation, embracing softness, the detail, and the familiar.
 
Léonore Chastagner works by hand-modeling, leaving the clay raw and unglazed. Ceramics, her primary medium and the material of archaeological excavation, of trace and permanence, allows her to inscribe the everyday into something lasting.
 
Her sculptural practice draws on feminist theory (Iris Marion Young, bell hooks) alongside questions, rooted in her art history training, about the status of artefacts and the scale of objects. Her engagement with ceramics also incorporates elements of her personal history, connecting to practices such as diary-keeping and miniature-making that have historically been associated with women's domestic lives.
 
Her work was recently presented at the 68th Salon de Montrouge and received the Jury Prize and Centrale for Contemporary Art Prize at Ceramic Brussels. She held two solo exhibitions in 2024, in partnership with MO.CO. at Espace Kiasma, and Repli stratégique at Saint-Ravy (Montpellier), and her work has also been featured in group exhibitions, including Earth and Art: Women Ceramicists at Carole Decombe Gallery (Los Angeles). Léonore Chastagner will exhibit for the first time at Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou in Paris in 2026.