Nicolas Deshayes

Talk Art Season 27 continues with sculptor Nicolas Deshayes whose works explore the form and materiality of bodies and what happens below their surfaces. Hosted by Robert Diament.

Process, or processing, is the impetus for Deshayes’ sculptures, which manage to convey states of liquid, hardness, hot, cold, and mechanically produced objects and systems. Vital processes of ingestion, and circulation, are evoked by elegantly utilitarian forms. Deshayes’ surfaces are consistently impermeable – recalling the architecture of public amenities.

Using predominantly casting methods with bronze, iron, or earthenware, Deshayes tends to seek out artisans and factories who specialise in techniques of production; their historical lineages and geographical particularities converging within his conceptualisation of the work as it develops.

Extreme heat is used in these casting processes commonly and the materials rely on changes in temperature in order to come alive. But molten metal rapidly hardens into a solid form, its movement as if suspended in time. Deshayes has recently rendered some of these sculptures functional again, plumbing hot water around a room, or pumping water into public ponds.

In his 2016 installation Thames Water, he recast the gallery as an organism by installing a series of interconnected radiators, in doing so concretising an analogy of the body and its systems to the plumbed and networked city. It is in these works that we are reminded of how their organic forms are not only reminiscent of the bodies of humans, but also of domestic, civic and biological circulatory systems.

Nicolas Deshayes was born in Nancy, France, in 1983, and lives and works in Dover. 

Follow: @NicolasDeshayes

Pillow Talk, a joint exhibition with Nicolas Deshayes & Paloma Proudfoot, runs at @QuenchGallery in Margate until 22nd March 2026.

Thanks to Stuart Shave Modern Art. Learn more: https://www.modernart.net/en/artists/nicolas-deshayes

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