Julia HaumontDans ma robe, couleur du temps

March 12 – April 25, 2026
17 Rue des Filles du Calvaire, Paris 3e

From March 12 to April 25, 2026, Les filles du calvaire gallery (Paris) presents the first exhibition by french sculptor, ceramicist, and visual artist Julia Haumont. Dans ma robe, couleur du temps (In My Dress, the Colour of Time) explores that delicate moment when childhood shifts, suspended between fears and desires, unspoken thoughts and discoveries.

Julia Haumont, Untitled (Sculpture No. 41), 2025, glazed earthenware, 110 × 50 × 33 cm © Jimmy Seng Tristao

On the ground floor, sculpture takes center stage. The same feminine, youthful figure engages in gymnastic exercises with a certain nonchalance, evident in the relaxed postures or the mismatched socks, despite their harmonious tones. The viewer observes, unseen, a session of stretching or posing, in which several moments seem to have been captured and brought. It would be the end of a dance class attended only by girls, where a final figure is being repeated while stretching, in the paradoxical intimacy, both collective and nurturing, offered by the group, before the first signs of adolescent modesty appear. Other forms, watery sculptures in red, blue, or gray, evoke the rococo of baroque mirrors, which further amplify the question of bodies and their transformations.

The move to the upper floor marks a transition as crucial as it is subtle. It is about the individuation of the body, for at first only a single sculpture appears, and, as at the edge of Eden, one cannot tell whether it is entering or leaving, revealing a new consciousness: that of nudity, of desires, and of gazes. The young girl, melancholic and serene, has just put on a wedding dress, perhaps her mother’s, who may have allowed her to wear it, for example to brighten her birthday. But then she suddenly realizes that the extraordinary garment, the one for the most beautiful day of one’s life, is torn at the knee. How many questions slip through this fold, how many fears and daydreams… Alone with them, the young girl suddenly sees a new figure appear on a wall, a dancing Harlequin, a wild reinterpretation of Andersen’s cut-out papers, whose eyes painted on a plate-mask look down on her, the first male presence, although composed of uterine shapes, disjointed and distant, comical and pitiable. Echoing this fundamental rupture, a large textile composition and several prints on buttercloth evoke, in a more vibrant vein, the richness and plurality of identities. Further on, in a dark cabinet, two leaning basins hint at a world of future discoveries. They belong to a girl who perhaps wants to be grown-up but is not quite yet.

Julia Haumont, Untitled (Sculpture No. 44), 2025, glazed earthenware, 126 × 35 × 30 cm © Jimmy Seng Tristao / Julia Haumont, Untitled (Sculpture No.40), 2025, glazed earthenware, 88 × 30 × 50 cm © Jimmy Seng Tristao

Dans ma robe, couleur du temps, the thread of an adolescence weaves itself through the progression of the works, knotting even as it slips away, a moment of engagement with the female body that is shaped and discovered, through it or despite it, in or against the other. The American writer Melissa Febos, in Girlhood, writes: ‘At thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter parent, I accepted our collaboration as something inevitable. I needed it, which only intensified my hatred.’ Between divorce and collaboration, every feeling from exuberance to malaise is possible, embodied in the full range of young girls’ postures, from solitary, calm relaxation against the wall to voluptuous stretching on the back, which recalls the offered but dead body of La Jeune Tarentine by Alexandre Schoenewerk.

Since graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts in 2017, Julia Haumont has been sculpting these postures. They belong to the same young girl, who could resemble her like a sister, if it were not for that unsettling seriality that allows one to move from a singular particular to the plural of a group and its condition. This body, at once unique and fragmented, which gradually enriches her repertoire, is read and spoken of as a multiple. Listening to Julia Haumont speak of it, the pronoun ‘they’ imposes itself: ‘they’ are always roughly the same size, for ‘they’ do not age, although ‘they’ remain balanced on that narrow line at the end of childhood. Only the flesh of the latest sculptures, shown here, has slightly lost its childlike suppleness, acquiring more muscular tension. The story playing behind their generic faces thus has no other subject than the plurals or collective singulars used by Monique Wittig: one, they. Moreover, the title of the exhibition, a fragment of one of the songs from Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Âne, remains free in its use, calling for a subject yet to be defined.

Julia Haumont, Untitled (Sculpture No. 42), 2025, glazed earthenware, 50 × 30 × 40 cm © Jimmy Seng Tristao

The tale is generally no more anchored in time or space than these young girls, which ensures its resonance. As changeable and iridescent as it is, the dress the color of time also recalls the magical and narrative invariants. Beyond the pleasure of carnival and period costumes, beyond the cruel enchantment of drama, one must deconstruct it: just as it is not desirable to marry one’s father, one should not imagine marriage as the happiest day of a life. The color of time here is less that of the ideal spring of the blue or red kingdom, where clouds drift across the fabric sky, than that of lost time, recovered only to be better demystified. Childhood fades into the first emotions of adolescence, soon diverted by the marital injunction. Witness Anne-Marie Schneider, a draftsman who animates her drawings in Super 8 films and screams in voice-over in Mariage (2003) a falsely innocent refrain that we have all heard: ‘I want to get married, have children, lots of children!’ How many sought princes or princesses, when perhaps what they desired was the whip-bearing maid, the page, or nothing at all?

In its time, Degas’ The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer caused scandal precisely because it displayed the sordid reality of the ballet corps in the Belle Époque. What is at stake here is less masculine or institutional predation than an invitation to reconsider what conditions us. If innocence must be preserved, it is certainly not by telling ourselves too many stories.

— Xavier Bourgine

Practical Information

Dans ma robe, couleur du temps
March 12 – April 25 2026

Opening Thursday, March 12, from 6 pm to 9 pm

17 Rue des Filles du Calvaire
75003 Paris, France

Opening hours:
Tuesday: 2:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Wednesday – Saturday: 11:00 AM – 6:30 PM