After studying architecture with Paul Virilio, Mâkhi Xenakis turned to set and costume design for the theatre, working in particular with Claude Régy. She then moved to New York, where she lived until 1989. There, she met Louise Bourgeois, to whom she showed her first drawings of spiders and small hideous women cowering in the middle of blank pages. Encouraged by Bourgeois’ strong support, the artist developed a series of drawings and engravings, large pastels in violent colours, flesh pink and dark purple, as well as charcoal sketches on the theme of loops, twists and turns and mollusc-shaped volutes, with patterns inspired by hair and octopus tentacles. This graphic proliferation in subtle contrasts of velvety black, grey and white was characteristic of her first artistic period. After writing a book about Bourgeois (The Blind Leading the Blind, 1998), she began to sculpt strange creatures made out of plaster moulded onto corrugated cardboard columns and topped with small fetish heads studded with pieces of wire or nails. In addition to this sculptural work, she published short stories about her childhood memories. Laissez venir les fantômes (Let the Ghosts Come in, 2001) evokes the figure of her father, the composer Iannis Xenakis. Les Folles d’enfer de la Salpêtrière (2004) serves as an accompaniment to the presentation of a group of sculpted figures in the Salpêtrière Hospital’s chapel in 2005. In this text, M. Xenakis gives a voice to the women of all ages who were locked up in the hospice. She uses writing and sculpture as an exorcism that enables her to tackle the subject of femininity and madness by expressing all her childhood fears – of the oedipal relationship, of fertility, of sexuality –, which she translates into tondo-shaped pastels framed in black fur. After the column-women, the moulding technique of which resembles Picasso’s sculptures from the 1930s, M. Xenakis produced a series of monstrous creatures with bloated bodies and ample bosoms evocative of prehistoric idols. These carnal, grotesque, and hirsute pink dolls were presented in groups of two or three at the galerie des femmes* in 2010 and were the subject of a beautiful text by Gilbert Lascault, in which he describes them as primitive idols of femininity. The Manufacture nationale de Sèvres created a pink bisque porcelain version of the sensual, curved figure, which M. Xenakis calls La Pompadour in a book she wrote on the subject. The little squat woman with soft, plump curves is reminiscent of her first drawings.
Marie-Laure BERNADAC
See this illustrated text on the website of the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
