Clémence Gbonon
Biography
Clémence Gbonon, The Red River, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
Clémence Gbonon is a Paris-based artist whose paintings register bodily and psychic gestures through bulbous forms, dripping lines, and vibrant complementary colors. Figures appear to strain, fragment, and dissolve within the canvas.
Her compositions operate through a “junkyard” logic, in which objects, motifs, and traces of everyday life—sentimental, utilitarian, or discarded—collide in productive tension. These layered constellations reflect the contradictions of desire, privileging intuition, improvisation, and material experimentation. Drawing from vernacular and self-taught practices, including the work of Bob Thompson and Thornton Dial, gestures are allowed to flow and contract, creating pictorial spaces in which the unconscious can emerge.
Born in 1994 in France, she graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2024 and also studied at Cooper Union in New York, following earlier academic training in public international law and political science. Her time in the United States—particularly in Washington, D.C., and New York—has been formative, deepening her engagement with American painting traditions, notably figurative expressionism and its emphasis on color, physicality, and performative gesture.
Her work has been shown in several exhibitions in Paris, notably at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, and internationally at Bomb Factory Art Foundation (London), Parfümerie (Frankfurt), FF Projects (Lagos), the Cooper Union, and Canada Gallery (New York). She is the recipient of the Sarr and Maurice Colin-Lefranc Prizes, as well as the Mennour Emergence #2 grant.
Works
A Chair Down From Heaven, 2025
Enquire