Photos by @lapeg
Artist’s Statement
Working primarily as a printmaker, my process is one of accumulation and transformation - printing, cutting, layering, and constructing compositions that investigate how images hold cultural memory. As viewers move through my larger pieces, the image behaves like a dynamic system: marks appear and dissolve, metallic surfaces expand and contract with shifting light. This instability is intentional, a way of modeling how cultural memory itself works, layered, non-linear, and perpetually recomposed.
Born in Paris and trained at the Duperré School of Applied Arts, I've lived in London, Yangon, Abidjan, Dakar, Istanbul, and Philadelphia. Each city reshaping how I think about image-making. Cut off from my etching press in many of these places, I turned necessity into methodology: immersing myself in local visual traditions, decoding their logic, and translating that knowledge into an expanded printmaking language that moves across paper, sculptural form, and installation.
My practice as a printmaker sits at the intersection of cultural research, material experimentation, and visual innovation. Research drives my material choices as much as aesthetics. My signature use of indigo emerges from sustained engagement with dyeing traditions in Myanmar and West Africa, where it carries deep historical and symbolic weight. Gold leaf functioning similarly, not as decoration, but as a printmaker's mark, encoding traces of place and cultural knowledge into the surface of the work.
Agathe Bouton - 2026
Biography
Agathe Bouton, (b.Paris, France; lives Wynnewood, PA, USA) is a French printmaker and multimedia artist known for her contemporary approach to printmaking. She earned her BFA and MFA from ESAA Duperré in Paris. Over the past 20 years, Bouton has lived and exhibited in cities like Paris, London, Philadelphia, New York, Rangoon, Dakar, and Istanbul. Her solo exhibitions include venues such as the Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain in Dakar, Galerie Martine Namy-Caulier in Paris, Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia and Zürcher Gallery in New York.
Bouton has received numerous awards, in 2022 she received the Meyer Family Award for Contemporary Art and being a finalist in the 98th Annual International Competitions of The Print Center in Philadelphia in 2023. Recently she won the Louise K.Binswangr Prize for best Artist. Her work is part of collections in prestigious French institutions like the Bibliothèque Nationale and American collections such as the Free Library of Philadelphia and Swarthmore College Library.