The mysterious case of one of the most important British artists of the 1990s who is back with a bang after more than 25 years

You could be forgiven for thinking you are inside Cathy de Monchaux’s Hoxton studio as you see her ideas take flight. Walls are papered with intricate drawings, shelves clustered with maquettes, sketchbooks laid open and scraps of paper pinned up demanding ‘don’t apologise for the way you are’ and ‘trust your sanity to no one’. There are pieces of fur, gold leaf, twists of wire and velvet; there are casts of frogs and bats and a cat lazily observing you from behind a couple of early sculptures.

But you are not in London. Rather you are standing in the British artist’s survey exhibition ‘Studio, Wounds and Battles, Desire is the Reiteration of Hope’ in the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris.

De Monchaux is one of the most important British artists of the 1990s. She graduated from Goldsmiths in London in 1987, the year before its student cohort came of age as the YBAs (Young British Artists). Her erotic, dystopic, obsessive-compulsive sculptures lured collectors and critics alike, as she wrapped metal bolts in velvet-and-denim sheaths and pleated leather between tightly bound brass plates.

She exhibited at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1993 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery four years later. A nomination for the Turner Prize followed, as did exhibitions in Paris, New York and Washington DC. Virginia Button described her work as ranging from ‘the religious to the secular, the sexually explicit to the chaste, the industrial to the domestic’. Her sculptures were praised as voluptuous and ravishing as well as mysterious and lethal. As the millennium dawned, you felt the future was hers for the taking. And then — nothing.

This new survey show comes 26 years after her last major solo exhibition, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, where she installed her sculptures with her four-month-old son in tow. Raising him largely on her own meant she prioritised making work for collectors rather than exploring new exhibiting possibilities. She installed a powerful public sculpture outside Newnham College in Cambridge in 2018, but that was the exception. But now, with this survey show in Paris, you can’t help feeling that she is making up for lost time.

‘I only had a year to prepare for the show so it’s been full on,’ she told me on opening night. ‘It has been quite emotional to see a range of work from the past forty years. We [curator Hugo Vitrani and herself] deliberately mixed the work up historically so that work across the decades could talk to each other.’ At the centre of the exhibition is the facsimile of her studio. ‘It was a bit of a risk to reveal so much private stuff, sketchbooks and writing,’ she confesses. ‘It felt quite unnerving as we were hanging the room, putting my heart and soul out there in a very raw way.’

De Monchaux has always had an affinity with France. She used to show at the Galerie Jennifer Flay in Paris, the fashion designer agnès B is a longstanding supporter of her work and even the essays in her Whitechapel catalogue were printed in both English and French. Although she was born and raised in Britain, her ancestors hailed from the small commune of Monchaux in northern France.

As a child she used to fantasise that she lived in Monchaux as a princess, tending her unicorn in her castle. This fictional world helped her cope with crippling anxiety.

Now aged 65, this childhood method of coping has been subconsciously feeding her work for the last decade, as the sado-masochistic ribbons and tethers of her 1990s sculptures gave way to a body of work that places women at the centre of time. Deep-rooted trees meticulously wound from wire stand alongside pregnant soothsayers and savants, whose hair stretches in tendrils into the treetops. At times unicorns weave in and out of the trees. She was horse-mad as a child but the unicorn satisfies her need for complexity. ‘We all know what a unicorn looks like,’ she says, ‘but it’s not real, it's 100% invented in our minds.’ One of her earliest sculptures is a ‘life-size’ skeleton of a unicorn, made from cane poles wrapped in paper. Another early work is Dreamboat (1986), completed while she was a student. She made it ‘quickly, instinctively’ and it wasn’t until she unpacked it prior to this exhibition and saw the pregnant woman recumbent on the deck that she realised the connection to her most recent work.

Her own pregnancy inspired two sculptures in 1999, Sovereign and Mauds Pink. Both stem from the fear that many artist-mothers have — a loss of freedom and creativity after the birth. ‘I was very fearful of the whole birth process,’ she says. ‘I was very anxious about how having a child would affect my freedom as a creative person, and about looking after somebody.’ Both sculptures feature fur-rimmed fissures and protrusions. While Mauds Pink rests in coils like a sated snake, Sovereign repeats its central motif obsessively, all lolling tongues and brass spikes. It brings to mind Game of Thrones and Alien, as well as Fifty Shades of Grey. ‘I haven’t seen these works since before my son was born,’ she says. ‘It was such a pleasure to rediscover them this week and realise that they were very strong and emotionally incisive, in a way that I don’t necessarily see when I first make my work.’

She regularly sits up all night sewing her sculptures or weaving figures and trees from slender copper wire. You feel that the process of making each one is what keeps the studio demons at bay. She struggles to accept work is finished, always wanting to add an extra flourish or complication. She didn’t finish Supplication of the Innocents until the day before this exhibition opened. Now this impossibly intricate sculpture floats in front of a wall, its long roots stretching into shadow as the pregnant women with their hair drawn up into antlers — into branches, into future possibilities — stand in a pale pink mist, like the first breath of dawn. Could this otherworldly sunrise herald the rebirth of De Monchaux’s public career? It augurs well.

Cathy de Monchaux, ‘Studio, Wounds and Battles, Desire is the Reiteration of Hope’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until September 13, 2026.