MAGO
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Margaux Derhy was born in France to a French mother and a Moroccan father. She studied at Central Saint Martins (CSM) and then took the MA Painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA). She currently lives and works between Paris and Massa, Morocco.
Her artistic work is rooted in family narratives and her Franco-Moroccan heritage, creating a reflection on emotional ties, transmitted memories and the empty spaces left by the absent, while exploring the multiple facets of multiple identities.
She is developing an experimental practice that combines painting, sewing machine work and traditional hand embroidery, while exploring ceramics as a discipline in its own right.
The community plays a central role in its approach, through the establishment of an embroiderers' residency and group in Massa, the founding of the women's artists' collective Le Cercle de l'Art and the writing of the artist's guide 'Le Backpack de l'Artiste'. In each project, there is a deep commitment to encouraging artistic exchange and creating opportunities for economic stability.
She has participated in several residencies, including Al Maqam in Marrakech, Morocco (2021), Enamoura in Marseille, France (2020), Studio Kura in Fukuoka, Japan (2018) or Greatmore Studios in Cape Town, South Africa (2017) and has been leading the Massa Stories residency in Morocco since 2019. She is part of the Soho House collection and has been shortlisted for the Dentons Art Prize 2020.
"The free woman wants to become... herself. To do this, she takes up space: from others who judge her but are indifferent to her, from conventions that she encroaches upon. A banality? Yet even the rebellious spirit is not immune to being caught up in what society tells her to become.
My work is about these thirty-somethings of 2016, of which I am a part, who feed this new obsession: to connect to one's true nature in order to find one's identity space, one's freedom."
Mago
