• Danysz Gallery announces EMPRESS, a solo exhibition by Yseult Digan, also known by her artist name YZ. A leading figure in contemporary urban art, YZ takes over the gallery’s three floors with a monumental and socially engaged installation that crowns ten years of work dedicated to her Empress series.

     

    From the very beginning, YZ has pursued an immersive, well-documented, and profoundly human artistic approach. Her work is rooted in the field: she immerses herself in cultures, connects with communities, and questions heritage and identity. From her experiences in Côte d’Ivoire, Colombia, Thailand, Morocco, Réunion Island, and France, she creates portraits of powerful women, always rendered in black and white, dressed in traditional garments, adorned with ancestral jewellery, and embodying the richness of cultures too often overlooked.

  • 'Black allows me to get to what is essential', says YZ - pronounced 'eyes'. What is essential, for the Franco-British... 'Black allows me to get to what is essential', says YZ - pronounced 'eyes'. What is essential, for the Franco-British...
    "Black allows me to get to what is essential", says YZ - pronounced "eyes". 
     
    What is essential, for the Franco-British artist, is these prople she renders frontally, using Indian ink, as well as the historical and political context to which they are connected. 
     
    Descendants of Caribbean slaves, women soldiers from a former African kingdom, female figures from various ethnic groups emblazed in their finest ornaments... 
     
    YZ depicts them on a giant scale, on wood panels, sheets of tin or the city walls. A way of rehabilitating some of the men and women that have been obscured or mistreated in History, and changing how we look at them, which has earned YZ the reputation of a socially committed artist. 

  • Her Empresses are not frozen icons, but real, inspiring, self-assured women. Their gazes, painted with striking intensity, confront the viewer. Impossible to ignore. They inhabit the space, taking over the walls from floor to ceiling. By giving them an imperial stature, YZ disrupts our perception: these women, so often rendered invisible in public spaces, are here portrayed as queens, guides and keepers of memory.
    YZ, Empress, Roubaix, Sephora (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    YZ, Empress, Roubaix, Eiryj (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    YZ, Empress, Zineb, Taroudant (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    YZ, Empress, Noura, Taroudant (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    YZ, Empress, Roubaix, Sephora

  • Born in Beijing in 2015 with the portrait of Empress Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule China under her own name, the Empress series has since unfolded around the world through residencies, exhibitions, and institutional invitations. In 2023, YZ opens a new chapter with Empress Celte, inspired by her immersion in Brittany and the creation of Keyll Forêt Jardin, an autonomous laboratory space she co-founded cantered on druidic knowledge, basketry, forestry, and natural medicine.

     

    The Celtic Empresses pay tribute to the sacred trees of the Celtic calendar — oak, elder, holly, hazel — and to the women who embody their symbolic energies: insight, healing, strength, and protection. The forest becomes a gallery, the faces become memory, and the women become messengers.

     

    EMPRESS at Danysz Gallery is not just a retrospective : it is an immersive and regenerative experience. It challenges the way we see women, memory, and the earth. It connects the personal and the political, the local and the universal. It asserts the essential role of the female figure in contemporary urban art, as a bearer of a new consciousness rooted in ecology, transmission, and collective reinvention.
  • More than a series of portraits, Empress is a tribute to those who carry, heal, connect, and pass on. It... More than a series of portraits, Empress is a tribute to those who carry, heal, connect, and pass on. It...

    More than a series of portraits, Empress is a tribute to those who carry, heal, connect, and pass on. It is also a fully realized artistic process: an anthropological exploration, self-sufficient production using reclaimed materials (old doors, rusted metal, driftwood), ecological commitment, and radical aesthetics.

     

    The choice of black and white, sometimes infused with sepia-brown tones, goes straight to the essence, heightening the gravity and power of the figures depicted. Nothing diverts attention from their gaze. Nothing diminishes their presence.

     

  • IN THE PRESS
    Le nouveau visage de Marianne engagée pour le street art !, BeauxArts (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Yseult YZ Digan III "Empress Zarha" - Dédale, Vannes , Street Art Avenue (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Exposition Empress par YZ à la Fondation GoodPlanet, Good Planet Mag (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    YZ de Open Your Eyes (Art urbain), Parisart (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    L'art urbain à pleins poumons, GraffitiArt (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    Le nouveau visage de Marianne engagée pour le street art !, BeauxArts

  • About the artist
     

    About the artist

    Yseult Digan, alias “YZ”, born in 1975, is a Franco-British artist. Her work has been presented in major institutions like the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. In 2017, she was selected to give a new face to Marianne - the national personification of the French Republic - as she appears on postage stamps, a reinterpretation which she named “Marianne l’Engagée.” In 2019, Eurotunnel entrusted her with the creation of a monumental work on both sides of the Channel. After having lived and worked for several years in Senegal and Ivory Coast, she now resides in France.