BRUSSELS.- From September 11 to December 13, 2025, La Verrière, the exhibition space of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in Brussels, unveils “Sourdre”, an exhibition by Claudine Monchaussé. The presentation of the work of this little-known sculptor also brings together artists and figures from different generations, including Nicolas Bourthoumieux, Damien Fragnon, mountaincutters, Germaine Richier and Marie Talbot. This is a unique opportunity for the public to immerse themselves in the artist’s ceramic creations, showcasing more than five decades of practice.

The exhibition draws its inspiration from the village of La Borne —in the Berry regio — a pottery mecca identified as early as the 12th century for its earthenware, where Claudine Monchaussé chose to live. She settled there in 1959 after discovering the stoneware sculptures produced there in Paris. She was self-taught and today, at the age of 89, is still tirelessly pursuing her production.

The exhibition features dozens of works spanning more than half a century of practice, from the 1970s to the present day. For her, “[her] pieces exist in the eyes of the viewer”, as if their life begins with the attention they receive. Striking, their shapes oscillate between spherical principles, symbols of fertility, and protruding elements, as if reaching for the sky. Her studio, where she works surrounded by images of virgins and bulls, bears witness to the importance of these themes in her work, their universal and timeless dimension.

The ninth exhibition curated by Joël Riff for La Verrière, “Sourdre” is Claudine Monchaussé’s second solo show and her first outside France. It’s a moment of recognition for an artist who is only just beginning to emerge, or to “sourdre,” as the title suggests, meaning to spring forth, to rise from the earth, to be born. Following the principle of the “augmented solo” show initiated by the curator, the exhibition brings her work into dialogue with that of esteemed influences such as ceramicist Marie Talbot and artist Germaine Richier. The show is enriched by intersecting perspectives: a new text by Damien Fragnon, plinth-like sculptures by Nicolas Bourthoumieux, and idol-like forms by mountaincutters accompany the journey.

Founded in 2000, La Verrière is one of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’s four exhibition spaces. As part of the Foundation’s programmes to support contemporary creation, artists are invited to embrace the space with the possibility of producing new works.

“SOURDRE”

Claudine Monchaussé brings things out of the ground. She is energy. Her impulse gives shape to sculptures that rise up against all odds. To encounter them is to be confronted by a determination of staggering simplicity.

The artist says she has never had the choice of doing what she does. She never learned to work. She can’t draw. She perceives in volume, distinguishing goals she must achieve. She simply has to get there. For more than six decades, a relentless necessity has driven her to develop this very production, in the conviction that it must exist as it is. An energy overwhelms her. It extends her body.

Her quest is not physical. It’s an inner pursuit. So absorbed is she by her gestures that she sees nothing but what she is shaping. She’s in the work. And although she has small brushes, strips of fabric, various utensils and a clay-covered wooden cylinder at her disposal, the real tool is still her mind. She says she is always saying the same thing. If she prefers not to speak much, it’s because she expresses herself in the studio, to the ritualised rhythm of two to three hours a day, then gives the floor to the fire.

Claudine Monchaussé is a dowser. She detects underground potential and accompanies its emergence. People often ask her where she’s lived when looking at her work. Her only homeland is La Borne. There, people work with stoneware and fire with wood. So that’s what she does. She is deeply attached to this village with its pottery traditions, a springboard for progress, a springboard that takes her further. Modernity re-established itself there after the war. The artist arrived in 1959. She seldom leaves.

People come to her. While not isolated, she confesses to a need for solitude. In her house, she is surrounded by books, which she reads or simply likes to have around her. In her workshop, a constellation of images surrounds her, and she is fascinated by the timeless complementarity of the mother goddess and the bull, a possible and supreme harmony whose synthesis she experiences.

She has never wanted to throw, and instead models tenacious statures with patience. To overdo it would be to tip the material towards failure. These pieces are flesh. She performs scarifications on them and has them adorned with flames. The artist sows. Now she’s reaping too.

The exhibition “Sourdre” is more than just a dawning. It is openly revealing. It presents itself. It has to come out, one way or another. Just when we thought we were narrowing it down, on the brink of understanding and capturing it, everything slips away, breaks free, pours out. So we let it flow, accepting that it’s slipping away, allowing it to escape. The more you dig, the more it flows. We might as well drink it up. On this great vertical axis proclaimed from the outset, without lessening the strong grounding that roots them below, the time has come to lift our gaze toward what these works are reaching for. A sentimental astronomy would invite us to approach them as devices for reading or even measuring space and time, upright like the gnomon on a sundial. They are pivotal. Constantly surprising the person who generates them, they provide points of reference, and in doing so, they provide comfort, help us live, perhaps even to heal. Any apotropaic dimension warding off bad luck is scattered, discreetly multiplied on its stiff support. We can imagine humanity seizing it, planting it in the ground or brandishing it as a trophy.

Claudine Monchaussé forges relays. She loves these inscribed forms that are passed from hand to hand. In the beginning, she was seated, clasping a piece of clay in her palms, precisely. The first nurturing silhouettes quickly evolved into a stricter, more geometric vocabulary, otherwise modest, initiating a certain mystery, viscerally passive, prodigiously willful. From that point on, the language and proportions of the work have imposed themselves with astonishing consistency. It goes above and beyond. It can’t be explained. Each work has its own destination, a charge that emanates from it and finds its own unique recipient. There must be an element of the sacred, something lost across so many civilizations.

But certainly nothing religious. To connect, what’s needed is the universal, and there are exponentially many of us who perceive it here. A mysticism of origins is at play, in the perpetual use of ecumenical symbols that never exhaust their vitality. For in this small, uncompromising fissure, access to their contours remains laborious. Everything has always been there, and yet new discoveries continue to emerge. It’s a true source.

The exhibition “Sourdre” features around forty ceramics by Claudine Monchaussé. This solo presentation is her first abroad, and one of the few of her entire career. The unprecedented panorama covers more than half a century of her artistic practice from the 1970s to today. The artist has waited for no one and for nothing to reveal an exceptionally coherent body of work. To highlight her productions, Brussels-based artist Nicolas Bourthoumieux has created a new series of sculptures that welcome the ceramist’s objects. He has just returned from this legendary land of potters in the heart of Berry – a region that in the 19th century, also saw the rise of Marie Talbot, a pioneer who transformed utilitarian ceramics. One of Talbot’s iconic tableware pieces enriches the installation, alongside an engraving by Germaine Richier and idols of mountaincutters, completing this gathering of fantastical objects. A text by sculptor Damien Fragnon, a connoisseur of mineral water, offers insight into the qualities of depths, their influence, their taste. Let’s welcome into the light of day that which, at last, springs from the farthest reaches of the earth.

Joël Riff

CLAUDINE MONCHAUSSÉ

Claudine Monchaussé revives her work from hell. Born in 1936 in Champagne, she moved to La Borne in 1959, after having discovered expressive ceramics in a gallery in the Place de La Madeleine in Paris, where she had been working as a typist. And it’s in the hottest part of a usually neglected wood-fired kiln that she fires her earthenware. Her works are recognisable by the constancy of their austere presence, and the endless variations in each one’s singularity. Over the decades, she has produced thousands of stoic sculptures that quietly emerge from the confines of the studio.

Claudine Monchaussé has gradually gained recognition thanks to the efforts of a group of collaborators who work towards increasing the visibility of her work in the ceramics world and beyond. Amongst them are her friend Renaud Régnier, who has regularly exhibited her work at the Musée de La Borne since 2008 in the exhibitions “Sans réserves” (2021-22), “Le sacré et l’intime” (2023) and “Trésor” (2025); the artist Marie Preston for the exhibition “La veine” at the Centre Céramique Contemporaine La Borne (2014); artists Benoît Maire and Julien Carreyn for “Photographies du soir” at Galerie Crèvecœur in Paris (2016); curator Anne Dressen for “Les Flammes” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2021); publisher Sylvain Courbois for “Sculptures” at Camoufleur in Lille (2022); designer matali crasset for “Le Nouveau Printemps” at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse (2023); and curators Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim for “L’Almanach 23: Kleinplastik (abstrakte)” (2023) at the Consortium in Dijon. In 2025, Renaud Régnier and Sylvain Courbois dedicated a stand to her, presented alongside Raphaël Zarka at Ceramic Brussels.

Her works have also recently been shown in the events “Galerie Besson: Retrospective of a Lifelong Passion” at Officine Saffi in Milan, “Jacqueline Lerat: Being and Form” at Sèvres – Cité de la Céramique in 2012, “Yvette and Pierre Maréchal: A Passion for Stoneware” at the Vassil Ivanoff Museum in La Borne in 2017, and “Pioneers of Modern Ceramics: La Borne” at the museums of the city of Bourges in 2019. Her work is part of public collections such as Sèvres – Manufacture and National Museums, La Borne Museum, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Cnap), as well as private collections of connoisseurs, primarily in France.

Claudine Monchaussé and Joël Riff met in 2018 at La Borne, and collaborated the following year as the artist integrated the AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions platform with a text written by the curator. He then invited her in 2021 to exhibit in “Faire essaim” at Moly-Sabata, published her in the Curiosité chronicle, and advocated in 2022 for the acquisition of a set of five sculptures for the Cnap collection, of which he is a committee member. The curator here acknowledges the essential role of Renaud Régnier, whose involvement made all of these projects possible. The depth of their long-term exchanges has allowed the exhibition “Sourdre” to realise its full potentia6l.

THE ARTISTS

Nicolas Bourthoumieux

Nicolas Bourthoumieux sharpens standards. Born in Toulouse in 1985, he studied at the university there, before graduating from the Ecole de La Cambre in Brussels in 2012. He grew up in the small Pyrenean town of Bagnères-de-Luchon, whose official motto “Balneum Lixonense post Neapolitense primum” recalls that its thermal baths are said to be the best after those in Naples. A member of Brasseries Atlas in Anderlecht, and active in the Noir Métal duo that exhibited at La Verrière in 2023, the artist develops a sharp sculptural and photographic production.

mountaincutters

mountaincutters hones rigorously embodied balances. Formed in 2012 during their studies at the Beaux-Arts de Marseille, the duo graduated in 2014, then moved to Brussels where they work today. Working with four hands, they call upon much more to bring about arrangements of guttural power, whose captivating clarity seems to reach us from very far away. Time itself seems sculpted. The duo has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe, and in 2021, Guillaume Désanges dedicated a monographic exhibition to them at La Verrière.

Germaine Richier

Germaine Richier keeps us on our toes. Born in Provence in 1902, she studied sculpture at the Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, then with Antoine Bourdelle in Paris. It was in the neighbourhood of her master’s studio that she went on to develop her entire body of work. Moving the cursor between human and beast, the artist delivers powerful representations of the living, and of what has been, both grounded in their own gravity. Violence screams silently everywhere. Despite her short career, she turned modern sculpture on its head. She died in 1959.

Marie Talbot

Marie Talbot is an icon of self- determination. Born Jeanne Brûlé in 1814 in Henrichemont in the Berry region of France, she was adopted by the Talbot dynasty of potters who helped build the reputation of La Borne, the ancestral home of French ceramics, where the artist found success. Primarily creating vessels – bottles and fountains – shaped like female silhouettes, bottles and fountains, she demonstrated an overwhelming self-affirmation, signing her pieces “Fait par moi, Marie” [Made by me, Marie] in a world of often masculine and anonymous folk art. She died in 1874.

Damien Fragnon

Damien Fragnon tastes, comments and classifies drinking water. Born in Clermont Ferrand in 1987, he studied at the École Supérieure d’Art Annecy Alpes before moving to Lyon in 2015 and Sète in 2020. By becoming a test subject for what springs forth, the sculptor ingests the vital ingredient in all its diversity, necessary for the enamel recipes he now develops conscientiously. He has benefitted from numerous residencies around the world, exhibits regularly in France, and was awarded a prize by Ceramic Brussels in 2024.