Maguy Banq was born in 1948, in Marseillan in the South of France. She shares her time between her home town and San Luis Potosí, in Mexico today, where she settled her studio. Graduated in 1992 from the School of Fine Arts of Mexico (Mexico City), she worked at first with Jorge of Santiago on the realization of monumental sculptures, before beginning her personal work.

The existentialism is in the center of her approach: the human being is predestined for nothing, he looks indefatigably for his purpose, for his reason for being. As a consequence, the characters of Maguy Banq are asexual, characterized to carry their universality. Set apart their positioning in the space and their posture, nothing allows physically to differentiate them from each other - to such a point that they could embody as well the successive stages, the wandering of one and same individual. The association of these human figures in minimalist geometrical forms is of the same process: the perusal of the latter underlines also a contingency, a questioning, an original anxiety there.

The circle and the sphere were, up to here, omnipresent in the work of Maguy Banq, as symbolic relays of the torture of Sisyphus, condemned person, according to the Greek mythology, to raise at the top of a hill an enormous rock, which got down again immediately below once the aim achieved. From now on, edges and straight lines replaced curves. Fictitious pavements, artificial bricks are the support and environment of the bronze sculptures, gobble up them, contain them … If previously, the round shape evoked the cycle, the exhaustion, the fall, the quadrangle raises from now on the question of the detention, the dead end, the blindness. What happens outside, behind bulwarks? Can we escape them except by the death? Every individual looks for an exit.

The second sliding which takes place in the recent work of Maguy Banq, affects attitudes. They do not express any more labour, nor the search for a balance, allegedly precarious. Here, figures have safe basis, their positions are stable, sometimes even serene. The characters are not solitary any more, they contact, they answer each other, with an obvious but chaste affection. Even the wrestlers do not seem to show aggressiveness to one the other, they take care. Their artificial confrontation is only a pastime in front of the expectation of a nevertheless vain liberation, so distant and invisible as the veins under the skins of bronze...