Nicolas Deshayes
July 18 - September 5, 2026 Champ Lacombe, Biarritz
Every sculpture contains an interior. Hollow or dense, sealed or porous, they negotiate the threshold between what is held within and what exceeds. Nicolas Deshayes approaches sculpture almost as an event of respiration, where form is produced through cycles of expansion and contraction, pressure and release. Circulation becomes both material and metaphor: a continual movement between containment and exchange.
For Deshayes, sculpture has long occupied the unstable territory where bodies and materials become difficult to distinguish. Metal carries the memory of its molten state; ceramic is transformed by heat yet permanently marked by its passage. Matter is never inert. It bears the trace of processes that exceed the finished object, making visible the forces from which it emerged.
The exhibition unfolds across the two levels of Champ Lacombe as a sequence of distinct yet interconnected encounters. Upstairs, a succession of ceramic sculptures explore enclosure, pressure and permeability through forms that appear simultaneously geological, anatomical and architectural. Les Baigneuses languish alongside Swans, Deshayes' first ceramic work: a pair of perfect pastel sinks, at once ominous and inviting. They function as gateways—both to the body of work that followed and to the notion of the “other” — of what lies beyond.
Cavities swell beneath taut skins, volumes fold back upon themselves, membranes harden around pockets of air. These sculptures evoke lungs, bellows, shells, ducts and geological chambers. Continually suggestive, never prescriptive.
Downstairs, the exhibition's underbelly, is occupied by Méduses, a series of functioning radiators whose circulation of heat transforms the gallery into a system as much as a space. Like the early Thames Water works, these sculptures refuse any clear distinction between utility and autonomy, infrastructure and body. Warmth becomes another sculptural material, moving invisibly through pipes, chambers and cast forms to extend the work beyond the object and into the conditions of the room itself.
Throughout, Deshayes's sculptures suggest a subtle choreography of material forces. Forms unfold through sequences of pressure, accumulation and release, producing works that appear suspended between states of becoming.
This sustained attention to interiors and systems recalls Gober, or equally Hepworth’s, exploration of the threshold between domestic objects and bodily experience. Deshayes allows material itself to become corporeal. His sculptures do not represent living systems so much as operate according to analogous conditions of exchange, where surfaces behave less as boundaries than as sites of passage. Elegantly utilitarian forms evoke processes of ingestion and respiration while remaining resolutely sculptural.
They breathe.
Nicolas Deshayes was born in Nancy, France, in 1983, and lives and works in Dover. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo, Thiene (2025); Modern Art, London (2025); Monteverdi Gallery, Castiglioncello del Trinoro (2024); Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire (2022); Le Creux de l’Enfer, Thiers (2021); FRAC Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, Dunkirk (2021); E-WERK Luckenwalde (2019); and Tate St Ives (2015). He has participated in recent group exhibitions at Kunstverein Hamburg and Pier Arts Centre, Stromness (both 2026); Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2025); Compton Verney, Warwickshire (2024); Stavanger Art Museum (2023); MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2023); Falmouth Art Gallery (2021); Belgrade Biennale (2020); Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (2019); Museion, Bolzano (2019); FRAC Île-de-France, Bussy-Saint-Martin (2018); Drawing Room, London (2017); and Fridericianum, Kassel (2015). In 2014, he was artist-in-residence at Tate St Ives. Deshayes’ work is held in the collections of the Arts Council Collection, London; Stavanger Art Museum; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; FRAC Pays de la Loire; FRAC Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, Dunkirk; Mona – Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; the City of Carquefou; Pier Arts Centre, Stromness; and Tate, London. A forthcoming solo exhibition will be presented at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, in 2028.
