Mâkhi XENAKIS

Born in 1956 in Paris, Mâkhi Xenakis, daughter of composer Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), is a French artist whose youth was shaped by her encounter in New York with Louise Bourgeois, with whom she formed a fruitful friendship and to whom she has dedicated several books. Through her connection with Bourgeois, she transformed the doubts and sensitivity that characterized her youth into strength and an artistic signature. Her aesthetic, defined by duality—between intimacy and strangeness, mental vulnerability and resilience, self-effacement and resistance—permeates each of her series of drawings, such as the “Spiders” and “Jellyfish” series featured in * Private * (Choice ).

Her creative process is synergistic, weaving together drawing, sculpture, and writing in a virtuous cycle that draws on memory, intuition, and an existential sensibility. Through her *Folles d’enfer* at the Saint-Louis Chapel in the Salpêtrière, she restores a face and substance to the millions of women who were anonymously imprisoned, making art an ultimate act of reparation. Although similar in their scars as prisoners, her “creatures” are each conceived in their own individuality; as such, acquiring them takes the form of an adoption.

Also exploring the themes of motherhood and feminism, her *Petites Créatures*—mishmash of flesh that are both unsettling and endearing—are as repulsive as they are captivating, a dual impression caused, according to the artist, by the unprecedented materialization within the shared visual field of “women’s experiences.”