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- 2025 Aura
- 2025 Split Body
- 2025 Learning to fly
- 2024 Par la fumée
- 2024 Arcadia
- 2024 Design Sediments
- 2024 Revenir du présent
- 2024 Equinoxes
- 2024 Theatrum Mundi
Installation view Learning to Fly for the exhibition Échos du passé, promesses du futur,
MAC Lyon (FR), 2025
Excerpt from the installation text Learning to fly for the exhibition Échos du passé, promesses du futur
“The installation Learning to Fly brings together paintings and sculptures conceived specifically for this exhibition, following Virginie Ittah’s research and creative residency at macLYON. During her time in Lyon, the artist immersed herself in the landscapes of the Auvergne–Rhône-Alpes region, collecting local materials such as pierres dorées, the ochre limestone characteristic of the area and a granitic sand known as gorrh rouge. Using prehistoric techniques, she transformed these raw materials into pigments that ground the work in its place of origin.
For this project, Ittah digitally models in 3D the chimeras and female figures that populate both her paintings and sculptures. These forms arise from a dialogue between her own virtual imagination, the photogrammetry of a live model, and references to classical antiquity most notably the figure of Aphrodite from the sculptural group Aphrodite and Eros in the Louvre.
Learning to Fly is a multi-sensory experience, engaging sight, sound, touch, and smell. Scent permeates the space through the diffusion of an olfactory artwork, while a second fragrance is contained within a blown-glass vessel carried by a fantastical creature on the altar. Visitors are invited to inhale it, even to apply it to themselves, creating an intimate and participatory relationship with the work. The fragrance blends natural and synthetic notes, including musk, an historically precious animal derived essence once obtained from the Asian musk deer, now endangered due to overexploitation in perfumery.
The installation also invokes the four elements: air and water are embodied in a floating sculpture, its indigo pigment derived from water-dwelling bacteria, while earth and fire find expression in a chimera sculpture composed of local stone and enthroned upon an altar. This dialogue between elements becomes a metaphor for spiritual elevation, a reaching toward another reality.
Through the creation of this dreamlike universe, Virginie Ittah offers a message of hope, an invitation to reimagine a respectful, enduring bond between humankind and the natural world. Out of a desire for symbiosis and hybridization, her work conjures new imaginaries in which human beings themselves become landscape, become stone, and merge with nature.” (MAC Lyon)
“The installation Learning to Fly brings together paintings and sculptures conceived specifically for this exhibition, following Virginie Ittah’s research and creative residency at macLYON. During her time in Lyon, the artist immersed herself in the landscapes of the Auvergne–Rhône-Alpes region, collecting local materials such as pierres dorées, the ochre limestone characteristic of the area and a granitic sand known as gorrh rouge. Using prehistoric techniques, she transformed these raw materials into pigments that ground the work in its place of origin.
For this project, Ittah digitally models in 3D the chimeras and female figures that populate both her paintings and sculptures. These forms arise from a dialogue between her own virtual imagination, the photogrammetry of a live model, and references to classical antiquity most notably the figure of Aphrodite from the sculptural group Aphrodite and Eros in the Louvre.
Learning to Fly is a multi-sensory experience, engaging sight, sound, touch, and smell. Scent permeates the space through the diffusion of an olfactory artwork, while a second fragrance is contained within a blown-glass vessel carried by a fantastical creature on the altar. Visitors are invited to inhale it, even to apply it to themselves, creating an intimate and participatory relationship with the work. The fragrance blends natural and synthetic notes, including musk, an historically precious animal derived essence once obtained from the Asian musk deer, now endangered due to overexploitation in perfumery.
The installation also invokes the four elements: air and water are embodied in a floating sculpture, its indigo pigment derived from water-dwelling bacteria, while earth and fire find expression in a chimera sculpture composed of local stone and enthroned upon an altar. This dialogue between elements becomes a metaphor for spiritual elevation, a reaching toward another reality.
Through the creation of this dreamlike universe, Virginie Ittah offers a message of hope, an invitation to reimagine a respectful, enduring bond between humankind and the natural world. Out of a desire for symbiosis and hybridization, her work conjures new imaginaries in which human beings themselves become landscape, become stone, and merge with nature.” (MAC Lyon)