Lena Hilton & Elodie Seguin, La Figure Peinturative
05.09 — 11.10.2025
For this first exhibition of the season, Abraham & Wolff is pleased to bring together Lena Hilton and Elodie Seguin, two artists with distinct practices yet united by a shared conception of painting. From one to the other, we find a concern for economy, a precise use of color, and the rigor of a sensitive practice built over time. For both, painting is a fertile reduction, made of potentialities and intentions addressed to the viewer.
Lena Hilton paints canvases. Her approach is analytical and methodical. Each series follows rules, unfolding from frameworks and grids that invite multiple variations. From these constraints, rooted in elementary geometry and close to a decorative language, emerge surfaces of emancipation and freedom. They offer a gaze that remains open to possibilities.
Elodie Seguin, on the other hand, shifts painting beyond the canvas, investing and distributing it within real space. “In all her works, she explores the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture (…) seeking the exact moment of undecidability, of perfect ambivalence.” Paradoxes, absence, the interplay of light and color, transparency, subtraction, doubling… all intersect in her research. Her installations and wall paintings integrate the dimensions and specificities of each site. They blend with volumes and surfaces, the real space becoming as much the interpretative framework of the work as it is interpreted by it. In its contraction, painting must “create place.”
If one privileges the canvas while the other surpasses it, their explorations converge toward a process of abstraction that cannot be defined merely by the absence of representation. The very title of the exhibition recalls this shared concern: through a play of inversion, “La figure peinturative” renders painting active and designates it as the subject of the figure. To open meaning, to implicate the real, to question painting—its means, its language, its history. A reminder that painting never begins from nothing, that it must also bring forth what is not yet, what time will once again conceal.
And in deciphering the statement they composed for this exhibition, one can find:
“… what is happening here? …
… we are looking …
… the vanished painting …
Lena Hilton’s work has been shown in France and abroad, in various exhibitions (All Over, Galerie des Galeries, Paris, 2016; Single Grid – Trame Simple, Wilde Gallery, Geneva, 2023), as well as at contemporary art fairs in Madrid, Turin, and Geneva. She was the invited artist for Windows on Talent at Galeries Lafayette in 2016, and in 2024 she created monumental decorative paintings for Hermès in the United States. She is a recipient of the Prix Novembre in Vitry (2015).
Elodie Seguin’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions such as MACBA in Buenos Aires, the PEAC Museum in Freiburg, MUDAM Luxembourg, the French Cultural Center in Milan, Fondation Ricard, as well as in the STATEMENT section at Art Basel and the Frame section at Frieze London.