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.
This preoccupation comes directly from my own life: having lived in seven cities across four continents, I've experienced firsthand how memory and identity shift and recompose with each new place. Born in Paris and trained at the Duperré School of Applied Arts, I've lived in London, Yangon, Abidjan, Dakar, Istanbul, Philadelphia, and now New York - 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.
Agathe Bouton - 2026
Biography
Agathe Bouton (b. 1969, Paris, France) is a printmaker based in New York whose work explores how images carry and transform cultural memory. She holds an M.F.A. in Arts and Textile Design and a B.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from ESAA Duperré, Paris, and has lived and worked across four continents, including London, Yangon, Abidjan, Dakar, Istanbul, and Philadelphia.
Bouton has exhibited internationally since 2000, with solo shows in the U.S., France, Senegal, Myanmar, Turkey, and the U.K., and group exhibitions at institutions including the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Royal West of England Academy.. Her honors include the Louise K. Binswanger Award (2024) and the Meyer Family Award for Contemporary Art (2022). Her work is held in public collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Free Library of Philadelphia. She is represented by Galerie Martine Namy-Caulier, Paris.