Atsoupé

Atsoupé is a Togolese artist born in 1986, based in Paris and represented by Galerie Anne de Villepoix, with whom she has had solo exhibitions including Bruits de Pluie (2023) and earlier presentations in the gallery's Traversée africaine cycle. Her practice spans painting, works on paper, and sculpture, and is shaped by an apparent paradox between childhood and violence that runs through all of her work. Her faceless dolls — strange feminine sculptures assembled from forged iron, leather, fabric, wool, plastic, bolts, and bells — and her densely worked portrait drawings together conjure a world of spirits at the threshold between past and future.

Atsoupé draws her subjects primarily from her immediate circle — friends, family, and close acquaintances — and her practice is rooted in a domestic intimacy that she describes as deliberately removed from external pictorial references. Her painted portraits are executed in layered washes of Prussian blue, carmine red, and jade green applied in virtuoso passages that give the anonymous faces a haunting melancholy. The faces, sometimes perforated by multiple holes or sutured with thread and ribbon, appear to scrutinize the world rather than be scrutinized by it. The dolls share this inward quality: naïve floral motifs ornament their surfaces as though a child's hand had come to animate silhouettes that are otherwise eerily still.

Atsoupé has exhibited at Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris and at the AKAA (Also Known As Africa) fair. Her work has attracted growing attention from collectors and institutions engaged with contemporary art from Francophone West Africa.