This Isn’t Your Typical White-Walled Gallery Exhibit

For most of the year, Château de Malleret operates like any other vineyard in Bordeaux, France. Each spring, the château’s team rearranges the dozens of wine barrels inside, and the cellars open up to reveal blond stone walls and exposed beams overhead. The architecture swallows the room before any artwork is even installed.

Nestled in the Médoc region of Bordeaux, the historic estate produces a range of wines. Its cellar is designed by renowned French architect Sylvain Dubuisson, whose signature geometric precision defines the property’s striking character.

On May 19, 2026, Tiffany Bouelle’s paintings will enter this space. The exhibition begins beneath your feet, with an intricate mural spanning over 19 meters, sprawled across the cellar floor, resembling a trail that guides visitors through a series of rooms.

Developed in collaboration with curator Yoyo Maeght, the installation places Bouelle’s older works alongside some of her newly produced art, including the large triptych Minab. Bouelle created the piece in 2026 after an attack on a school in the Iranian city of Minab that, she says, left behind “a deep scar in the memory of a place.” The triptych was further inspired by Guernica, an oil painting by Pablo Picasso, widely regarded as one of the most powerful anti-war works in art history. 

“Paintings carry the memory of a city,” says Bouelle. “It transforms tragedy into a collective image that cannot be erased.”

The 33-year-old Paris-born artist sees painting as a way of making sense of the experiences that shape her everyday life. Her work is connected to her mixed cultural identity (French and Japanese descent) and explores the tension between the emotions she feels and the stories she tells herself. She describes her art, in abstract terms, as shaped by “obsession, abundance, and information.”

In other words, she transforms life experiences into visual forms and movement. 

Beyond paintings, Bouelle also creates performance art. Her first solo presentation took place in 2019 at the Asia Now art fair with the Tokoïte Gallery. She’s also extended her visual language into site-specific installations, collaborating with houses such as Hermès and Chanel Beauty. In 2025, Hermès displayed Bouelle’s hand-painted horse sculpture — made from washi, wood, and layered paint — in its boutique on Rue de Sèvres in Paris. That same year, she curated a two-hour show at the Musée Bourdelle in Paris, during which she painted a large-scale piece on stage, surrounded by an audience sitting at long dinner tables draped with hand-painted textiles. 

This May, Bouelle’s work will be featured at the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s leading international art exhibitions. Her paintings explore familiar themes of gestures — expressed through the physical movement she makes while creating a piece — and memory as a form of survival. Her brushwork draws from Japanese calligraphy traditions.

“My practice is rooted in the spontaneity of gesture,” she says.

Growing up in Paris, Bouelle was drawn to art as a creative expression. Influenced by her grandfather, she developed a passion for drawing, calligraphy, and the visual arts. As a young adult, she studied applied arts at the École Duperré in Paris before expanding her practice into styling.

Maeght was born in France and grew up between Paris, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, and New York, surrounded by visual artists. Her grandparents, Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, founded the Fondation Maeght and worked closely with twentieth-century modern artists like Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti. This environment shaped Maeght’s approach to exhibitions. Instead of overly explaining the artist’s work to viewers, she leaves room for interpretation.

After attending her family’s gallery openings and gatherings as a child, Maeght learned to “feel the artist,” she says, rather than analyze or define their intentions. During our conversation, she pauses to show me a photograph of herself at three-and-a-half years old, standing at an exhibition opening. In the photo, Pablo Picasso and poet Jacques Prévert lean in toward Maeght, fully engaged, as if the surrounding crowd had fallen away. The questions she asked as a child stayed with her and continue to inform how she works today.

Rather than organizing works chronologically or thematically in an exhibit, Maeght arranges them according to “feeling,” she says, placing pieces in relation to one another so that each alters how the other is seen.

“The mystery of a piece is important,” she says. 

This intuitive approach guided her decision to showcase Bouelle’s work at Château de Malleret. She saw the château as a space with a strong presence that could effectively meet Bouelle’s work on equal terms.

“You need to bring over pieces of work stronger than the place,” Maeght explains.

She first reached out to Bouelle on Instagram after years of following her work online. Their collaboration developed gradually through conversation. Over the past year, the pair then talked about presenting Bouelle’s work at the Château de Malleret’s cellar.

Maeght noticed how Bouelle’s paintings had visually changed in both form and subject over the years. Rather than starting from a fixed idea of Bouelle’s current work, she was interested in the development of Bouelle’s artistic voice — “where she’s coming from, and where she wants to go.”

For the past few months, Bouelle and Maeght have worked together in Paris to shape how the paintings will be experienced within the château, carefully developing the sequence in which the works unfold and determining the placement of her pieces throughout the space. The result is an installation that allows Bouelle’s work to adapt to the site’s expansive architecture and layout. Or, as Maeght puts it, Bouelle “has to win the war between the place and her work.”

The collaboration has remained fluid. The pair is still deciding where Bouelle’s artwork will appear and in what order. “We are currently working on 3D models for the placement,” she says. Bouelle’s overall direction has remained consistent, but working with Maeght has led her to think carefully about how the château’s large scale affects both the art’s placement and visitors’ movement across the cellar floor. 

Bouelle wants to work within the massive space instead of trying to transform it. On opening day, she’ll create her mural on the floor during a live performance.

For ​​Maeght, curation is a form of mediation. She wants viewers to form their own understanding of the art. “I don’t try to explain,” she says. “I propose to the public.”

As part of the exhibit, Bouelle will also construct a large wave sculpture, suspended above visitors in the cellar. She describes it to me over Zoom by holding up a piece of white paper and shaping it into a wave. The piece will encourage viewers to look upward as they move through the cellar.

Unlike a city gallery, the château requires visitors to travel some distance from Bordeaux. The building itself is set apart from the network of museums and exhibition spaces where visitors move quickly from one room to the next. Bouelle’s exhibition is designed to make that journey feel worthwhile by inviting a slower way of looking — or as Maeght explains, it’s “like a walk, and you have to arrive somewhere.”

Bouelle connects this artistic idea to a larger philosophy on how humans today interact with images. “We spend our lives scrolling through images of garments and events on our screens,” she says. In contrast, she hopes the château exhibition will offer visitors a chance to look more closely at art, and without distractions. She hopes visitors leave with a feeling of having experienced something rare.

“To suspend time through a painting,” she says, “would be a remarkable achievement.”