Winnie Mo Rielly’s works inhabit space as much as they explore it. Body and architecture intertwine, skin and surfaces merge within confined interiors. She probes the thresholds of identity in domestic space: how the self moves through it, slips in through cracks, vanishes into corners, dissolves into objects. The body is no longer an isolated form, but a dispersed presence. Her work shapes memory into matter – sculptures where intimacy becomes landscape, and landscape becomes a sensorial experience of the self.
In Rielly’s work, walls push against their own limits. Space contracts and stretches under the effect of our passage through a distorted reality. From within their silent density, amorphous presences keep watch over the boundary between outside and inside, over the passage from plane to three dimensionality. Surfaces as active thresholds. Photography and drawings fuse with sculpture, embedding themselves in the walls, penetrating the material. Diverted from their representative function, they settle like an imprint, crossing space, inscribing themselves into form. Image no longer depicts the world, it becomes its flesh.
Beneath taut surfaces, skeletons held in suspension suggest an internal anatomy. Rielly proceeds by inversion: surface gives way to depth, the shell is hollow, inhabited from within. She peels the skin of spaces, applies that of bodies. Two complementary gestures, converging toward the same question: what divides, what holds together. A continuous body losing itself and whose very dissolution constitutes the form.
Beyond the borders of the body, forms overflow, slip through, exceed their frames and play with the dimensions and structures they inhabit. Rielly raises a fundamental question: what does it mean to inhabit a structure, whether architectural or social? She builds a corporeal language that opens a conversation with surfaces, matter and viewers, creating an immediate circularity in which one looks at while being observed, and where moving through space transforms it.
Within this transitional zone, the artist plays and moves freely between meanings, unbound from the constraints of the real. Neither fully subjective nor truly objective, suspended between inner and shared worlds, it opens as an in-between space of experience and potentiality, without fixed limits or sharp separations. Her sculptural canvases, applied images and organic structures are precisely that: envelopes created for a presence that refuses to be contained within a single body. Against collapse and fixity, the dissolution of the self is not a loss, it is an opening.
At the MEP, Winnie Mo Rielly takes over the Studio with an immersive installation conceived as an organism, a space that breathes, reacts, watches and is watched by those who move through it. The exhibition unfolds as a body in expansion, extending beyond its own borders.
By Tiffany Dornoy Rezaei
“It is beautiful, my new, protruding spine. For the first time I understand what it means to love your own body.” Mariana Enriquez, A Sunny Place for Shady People, Random House, 2024.
Born in London in 1993, Winnie Mo Rielly lives and works in Paris. She combines photography, sculpture, and performance art to explore a dual interest in domestic spaces and bodies in motion. In her work, experiences of forced proximity are, counter-intuitively, transformed into opportunities for intimacy.
Working in her studio, the artist usually begins by taking pictures of herself, creating a dynamic if fragmentary record of her body. Serving as a sort of “skin,” the resulting images are stretched over supporting shapes that evoke organic forms. These objects, however, exceed or reconfigure the formal and volumetric qualities of the human body, which is never represented in its entirety in Rielly’s work. Yet, all these fragments echo one another in a meaningful way, also hinting at a greater, more substantial presence.
Rising to the occasion of her first solo show at a museum in Paris, Winnie Mo Rielly has designed an immersive installation that takes over the MEP’s Studio gallery with a mix of recent and brand-new pieces. The artist creates an environment whose ambiguous character reflects that of the pictured bodies. Definitive identification remains elusive: in a way, the Studio turns into an “anti-space” where familiar points of reference lose some of their sharpness, in the same way a commonplace scene might feel eerie on a theater stage. Rielly’s photographic sculptures—or sculptural photographs—coexist in an atmosphere of quiet tension: rather than a linear narrative, the presentation offers a fragmented, re-composed experience in and of itself. The point is to take our time, so as to really look at the works of art, move between and around them, and make space for them to speak. What is at stake in Winnie Mo Rielly’s work is the possibility of an enhanced body, exceeding its own boundaries and seemingly expanding into space, matter, and images themselves.
A graduate of École Duperré (Paris), Central Saint Martins (London), and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris—where she was the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Fondation de France’s Multimedia Award—Winnie Mo Rielly was awarded FoRTE’s Contemporary Art grant in 2023 by Île-de-France region. Her work has been exhibited widely in group exhibitions, at institutions including Frac Île-de-France / Les Réserves, the Théâtre National de Chaillot, the Balice Hertling gallery, the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, the Fondation Fiminco, and Camden Art Centre. Work by the artist is represented in the collections of FRAC Île-de-France / Le Plateau, Christian Dior Parfums, Société Générale, and Maison Chaumet
By Clothilde Morette, curator of exhibition Infractuosité & director of exhibitions of the MEP