Adèle Vivet︱The Private and The Grotesque
Artist portrait, 2026. Photo: Ania Zawadka.
What happens when the restrained begins to spill over its edges?
For French artist Adèle Vivet, bodily containment can give way to excess. Working across sculpture, ceramics, 3D printing, and drawing, Vivet constructs densely ornamental pieces where autofiction and rave politics form destabilized structures. Her practice brings several centuries into frame. Gothic capitals, tympanums, and bas-reliefs acquire the logic of digital modelling. The gargoyle, the caryatid, the siren, and Medusa—bodies already laden with mythologies of desire, service, and monstrosity—are taken from their moralizing context and rendered new anatomies.
The historical is not preserved at arm’s length, but functions as an intimate vocabulary with the potential for mutation as the ornamental migrates from the cathedral onto the flesh. What emerges there is an almost stifling composition of hydro-chimeras, autophagic nymphs and self-devouring totems, their planes crowded with bodies, gestures and miniature episodes. There is something distinctly medieval about the way these sculptures accumulate stories: scenes are compressed into one another, resembling the Gothic bas-relief carvings which famously depicted the central Christian narratives alongside the supernatural. Stylistically, however, their construction belongs unmistakably to the present.
Vivet’s precision in 3D printing fluently complements the glazed tactility of ceramics. This dynamic between the archaic and the algorithmic runs through Vivet’s treatment of the body. Her figures swell, fold into themselves, consume and are consumed in return. They are excessive not just in scale or ornament, but in their vices such as temptation and appetite. Pleasure is doubled by its reprimand; desire alongside the shame that follows it. Vivet’s fascination with the grotesque becomes a primarily useful language for this contradiction because it refuses the clean separation between attraction and repulsion. The premise validates that the body can be seductive and abject in unison.
There is also something almost theatrical about these creatures. They borrow the exaggeration of myth and sacred imagery, yet their dramas are acutely private: fantasies, compulsions, embarrassment, desire, bodily discomfort. Vivet’s autofictional dimension enters through the back door of mythology rather than being laid out as a direct confessional. In our interview, Adèle Vivet expands on her imagery, returning to the sites of her childhood, the Gothic architecture of Saint-Ouen Abbey in Rouen, and the ways the fantastical and the body continue to shape her world-building.
Adèle Vivet, Nymphenbrünnen, exhibition view, 2026. Photo: Lucia Neri.
What is it about the visceral and the transgressive that feels particularly generative to your practice?
For several years, I have been exploring questions surrounding the female body, shame, and what is meant to remain hidden. My practice is first and foremost a form of catharsis: it allows me to explore self-perception, the experience of the body, concealed fantasies, and, above all, the mechanisms of shame.
I work primarily through autofiction. Experiences from my everyday life become material that I transform, distort, and reinvent through memory and fantasy. This has allowed me to address issues such as body dysmorphia, bulimia, and eating disorders, while also considering the cultural and social conditioning that shapes our relationship to the body. I am interested in a female body that rejects this conditioning through excess, bodily fluids, desire, and appetite: a body that takes pleasure precisely in what it has been taught to consider ugly.
Having myself been caught for many years in mechanisms of shame, concealment, and disordered eating, art became a way of expelling a violence that had been internalised and directed against myself. Although my practice begins with an individual experience, I believe these forms of violence are systemic. We still have a long way to go to allow women and gender minorities to speak about their own bodies from their own perspectives, rather than being represented solely through the gaze of others.
Desire is also deeply entangled with shame. I remember considering some of my fantasies “deviant” for a long time. Today, I take pleasure in reclaiming them and using them to expose another dimension of that internalised violence.
I am also shaped by the Judeo-Christian imaginary that permeates French culture. The body, and particularly the female body, has historically been associated with guilt, impurity, and sin when it expresses desire or asserts its own existence. To occupy space with a body perceived as too large, too visible, or too excessive, and to claim what is supposed to remain hidden, therefore becomes an act of resistance. It means reclaiming what has been made shameful: desire, excess, and ultimately the right to fully exist within one’s own body.
Your art moves between different cultural references from Gothic and Romanesque to contemporary club and rave culture. How do these ostensibly different worlds connect to one another?
I grew up in an environment deeply invested in art and architectural history. My grandparents are historians specialising in Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Normandy. As a child, I repeatedly played with my sister in the hidden parts of monuments such as Mont-Saint-Michel and Saint-Ouen Abbey, for which my grandfather had the keys. So before becoming political or aesthetic references, the Middle Ages and their contemporary reinterpretations had a deeply emotional significance for me. They are also a way of paying tribute to the body of knowledge and heritage in which I grew up.
Then, I became increasingly interested in the cultural functions of these forms. I have always been fascinated by the tension in late medieval imagery between desire and shame, the grotesque and the sublime. This tension can be found throughout Flamboyant Gothic imagery, where grotesque figures coexist with ethereal ones, I am thinking in particular of The Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, as well as depictions of Hell, which Umberto Eco extensively discusses in his History of Beauty. Later on, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, in particular, fuelled some of my earliest visual fantasies. I remember spending hours looking at reproductions of The Garden of Earthly Delights: bodies are devoured, transformed, or brought into states of pleasure, all with a humour that is simultaneously gargantuan and extremely refined.
This is where I find a connection with club and rave culture. Both worlds can oscillate between emptiness and fullness, control and its loss. Both can become spaces in which the body is transformed, transcendented, or temporarily dissolved.
Club culture also contains a productive contradiction between appearance (clothing, aesthetic codes, the performance of the self) and the possibility of genuine bodily liberation. The club can be deeply political and simultaneously profoundly commercial, bringing feminist and queer forms of resistance into contact with the overconsumption and homogenisation of contemporary nightlife.
My experiences with psychedelics in these spaces intensified this connection.
In an environment where we look at ourselves as much as we look at other people’s bodies, such experiences can lead to what is often described as “ego dissolution.” For me, this was particularly revealing: having grown up with a strong sense of surveillance and constant control over my own body, being able to temporarily forget it within a collective and cathartic space was a significant turning point. Psychedelics also changed the way I perceive form: I began to see the world as more fractal and modular, and the self less as an autonomous entity than as part of a larger environment. The individual becomes collective; the boundaries of the body shift.
I regularly collaborate with electronic music producers to give my installations an architectural and immersive dimension. For my solo show Nymphenbrünnen curated by Mathilda Portoghese, I worked with DJ and producer Laze, who also has a background in architecture. Her sound design moved between ethereal, timeless sounds and more physical, immersive textures. The installation could therefore evoke both the ambient music of a rave and almost religious sounds within a cathedral. Perhaps this is where these worlds meet most strongly for me: in their ability to use space, sound, the body, and excess to produce an experience that momentarily transcends the individual.
Adèle Vivet, Nymphenbrünnen, exhibition view, 2026. Photo: Lucia Neri.
There are recurring tensions in your art such as desire-restraint and pleasure-guilt. How do you translate these psychological tensions into forms?
The tension between desire and restraint is translated into my work primarily through excess. I am interested in what happens when something that has been contained for too long suddenly overflows. Concealment is therefore a recurring theme in my practice: hiding desire, hiding the shame of one’s own body, hiding bulimia. Even my graduation project in 2020 literally consisted of “hiding” a history of ornament.
I remember, for example, secretly drawing erotic scenes as a child (naked female bodies, BDSM scenes, fantastical situations) and hiding them under my mattress. My younger sister eventually discovered them without ever mentioning them to me. Looking back, I know that she already understood that these desires, although experienced as shameful, could be something shared.
Today, I work in the opposite direction. Rather than hiding what has been repressed, I use excess and overflow to make those mechanisms visible. My sculptures devour themselves. Female autophagic figures reenact episodes of bulimia, while bodies swell, collapse, stretch, and become impossible to fix.
The body therefore never appears as a stable representation. It becomes fluid and unstable, reflecting the changing and sometimes violent perception produced by body dysmorphia. A belly can become a balloon, a vessel, a mountain, or a carcass. Form becomes a way of materialising perception rather than simply representing anatomy.
This logic also structures the ornament. I fill, accumulate, layer, and then expel. Ornament becomes excessive, grotesque, and narrative, almost as if the sculpture were physically enacting the cycle of ingestion and rejection.
I try to consider every part of a sculpture as narrative material through ceramic, 3D modelisation and printing and drawing. Bodies intertwine, faces emerge, scenes overlap. Each fragment can refer to a lived experience or to a metaphorical figure generated through autofiction. Sculpture becomes a way of making visible tensions that would otherwise remain internal: desire and restraint, pleasure and guilt, fullness and emptiness, exposure and concealment.
In your practice, you treat ornament as something that can determine or shape the perception of the body. How do you view the relationship between ornament and the body? As an armour, skin, confinement, architecture, or something else?
I come from a design background, where ornament has a particular relationship to architecture. In Ornament and Crime (1908), Adolf Loos famously rejected ornament as superfluous and argued that form should be closely connected to function. Since then, the role of ornament has changed considerably, and postmodernism in particular rehabilitated it as a language in its own right.
This history is important to me because ornament can do much more than decorate. It can narrate, communicate values, reflect a society, or even function as propaganda. That is why I gradually shifted my attention from architectural ornament towards another form of architecture: the body. Like a building, the body supports, transforms, ages, and carries meaning. But unlike architecture, it is also an active subject: it inhabits, perceives, and experiences space. I therefore like to think of the body simultaneously as subject and object, architecture and inhabitant, structure and surface.
The body is always caught within systems of representation that seek to define it, constrain it, or make it desirable. What interests me is reversing that relationship.
My body becomes ornament; my face becomes a head of Medusa. I claim the right to produce my own image and to decide how my body can be looked at, transformed, and narrated. There is something deeply political in that gesture: reclaiming the power to objectify one’s own body rather than allowing other gazes to determine what it should be.
Adèle Vivet, Schiffala, detail, 2026. 3D printed PLA and glazed ceramic.
What is it about fantastical monsters and the grotesque that makes them such useful concepts for thinking about the body?
I have an endless fascination with myths, legends, folktales, and popular beliefs. These figures offer a particularly rich way of speaking about the body because they allow me to create distance from autobiographical material. The monster becomes a way of speaking about oneself without having to represent oneself directly.
Female monsters are especially interesting to me because they often reveal how a woman can be transformed into a threat through the gaze directed at her. Medusa is perhaps the clearest example. What interests me in her story is the relationship between beauty, monstrosity, and desirability: a woman who escapes established norms can herself become perceived as monstrous.
I am particularly interested in Hélène Cixous’s reinterpretation of Medusa in The Laugh of the Medusa, where she overturns the traditional figure of the Gorgon and transforms her from an object of fear into a figure of power. This reversal is fundamental to my practice: taking a body constructed as threatening or abnormal and allowing it to become a subject capable of looking back.
The siren offers another version of this ambiguity. She is simultaneously woman and animal, object of desire and figure of knowledge. In Andersen’s version, she becomes a profoundly melancholic figure of desire, renunciation, and bodily transformation. She wants another person, but also wants to become someone (or something) else. For me, this makes the siren a powerful metaphor for the gap between the body we inhabit, the body we perceive, and the body we imagine we could become.
I am also interested in architectural figures such as gargoyles and caryatids. Gargoyles embody overflow: they are mouths through which architecture expels its fluids, while also providing a space for the grotesque and the monstrous. Caryatids represent almost the opposite condition. Their bodies are structural, decorative, visible, and yet deprived of agency. They are literally women-as-objects.
This contradiction is something I reclaim in my own sculptures. My caryatids become self-portraits that can express fantasies, anger, and fears. If the caryatid has historically been a structural object, I try to transform her into a structural subject.
That may ultimately be what interests me most about the grotesque and the monstrous: they allow bodies that have been constructed as objects, threats, or anomalies to speak, desire, and look back.
What does it mean to you to return to an architectural memory from your childhood from an adult and artistic viewpoint?
More than architecture’s structural function, it is its narrative function that has always fascinated me. Visiting a monument as a child is an experience deeply shaped by play and fantasy. With my sister, we would transform ourselves into ogres, witches, countesses, wicked stepmothers, or courtesans. The monument became an extension of our imagination: a real, historical setting in which we could invent entirely fictional worlds. The ruins of a fortress could suddenly come back to life, and we would find ourselves transported to fourteenth-century Normandy, into the world of the Hundred Years’ War. What interests me now is realising that this way of looking at space has never really disappeared.
When I create new works, I still find myself playing. I move my figures around like dolls, imitate them, give them voices, and invent situations around them. These are essentially the same processes I used as a child. The difference is that I now have the materials and tools to give physical form to those imaginary worlds. I am also fortunate to continue this process with my sister, Blanche Vivet, who is herself a visual artist. During a recent residency at the Domaine de la Briantais in Saint-Malo, we developed The Witch and the Siren, an exhibition built around shared imaginary spaces, real architectural references, and characters shaped by our memories, desires, and projections.
Returning to the environments of my childhood therefore does not simply mean revisiting a memory. It means recognising that these places helped construct my imagination and my way of producing narratives. Architecture has become a space of projection for me: a place where reality can be solid enough to accommodate fiction. Perhaps my work is still, in some way, about entering these spaces as the child I once was, but with the means of the artist I have become.
Adèle Vivet, I don't ask you to feel my void, detail, 2026. Glazed ceramic and 3D printed PLA.
You have described ornament as a way of reading the political, cultural and social values of a particular period. What can ornament tell us about the society that produces it and perhaps about the society we live in today?
I deliberately use ornament in an excessive, grotesque, almost suffocating way. For me, it materialises a culture of consumption and abundance. Thinking about excess and fullness also means embracing a certain degree of kitsch, which I find particularly symptomatic of our time.
At the centre of these ornaments are female bodies conceived as active subjects, liberated from capitalist standards of beauty: strong, swollen, asymmetrical, sometimes excessive bodies. I 3D modelize them myself rather than relying on pre-existing body online libraries, which still lack considerable diversity.
My graduate research in Eindhoven also led me to understand ornament as a political and cultural language. Trajan’s Column, for example, uses bas-relief as both a narrative and ornamental device to recount Roman military campaigns, making it an instrument of political propaganda. Romanesque tympana similarly used imagery and the grotesque not only to decorate churches but also to communicate religious narratives.
Later, postmodernism challenged modernist austerity and expanded the possibilities of ornament. This is one reason I am particularly attached to eclecticism. Mixing styles allows different histories and ideologies to coexist and produce something new: a kind of collage.
This also informs my use of materials. The contrast between 3D printing and ceramics brings together two different temporalities: technological innovation and digital fabrication on the one hand, and an almost timeless attachment to craftsmanship on the other. Their coexistence reflects something I recognise in our own moment: a constant tension between the desire for technological novelty and a nostalgia for older forms of making.
What projects are you currently exploring and/or looking forward to the most for the rest of 2026?
This summer, I am taking part in the group exhibition Jackpot, organised by Erratum Projects as part of the OFF programme of Art-O-Rama in Marseille.
I have also recently travelled to Ankara to begin developing a new series of works with Turkish sculptor Hayri Şengün. We are working towards creating chimeric objects in bronze and brass, which gives me the opportunity to explore a new medium while continuing to develop my formal vocabulary.
I am particularly interested in what collaboration does to the idea of authorship. How can a work become genuinely collective while preserving the individuality of each participant? For me, collaboration is also a way of challenging the myth of the artist as a solitary, all-powerful figure, a model that can sometimes reduce those around the artist to the role of the “muse.”
These new works will be part of a major exhibition I am preparing for summer 2027. My sister, Blanche Vivet, and I will undertake a residency at the Musée Courbet in Ornans, culminating in a duo exhibition. The programme focuses on intergenerational and interfamily exchanges in the art world, with particular attention to Juliette Courbet, Gustave Courbet’s sister, who played an important role in preserving and disseminating her brother’s work after his death.
With Blanche, we want to bring our own voices as sisters into this history and reflect on family heritage and transmission. Our grandmother, who was an important feminist figure in shaping both of us, will be central to the project. Together, we want to explore themes including the now-outdated notion of “hysteria,” libido, migraines, domestic confinement, and fabulation as a form of escape.
The exhibition will run for six months in the spaces of the Ferme Courbet and will
involve the production of a substantial body of new work.
Adèle Vivet, Nymphenbrünnen, exhibition view, 2026. Photo: Lucia Neri.
Adèle Vivet, mandagora self-portrait, 2024. Oil painting and 3D printed PLA.
