Galeria Foco is pleased to present Zangbeto: The Night Hunters, a solo exhibition by Pauline Guerrier. Opening March 19, 6 PM.

The exhibition unveils the results of the artist’s research conducted in Benin in 2024, during her second artistic residency at the Fondation Zinsou. Deeply engaged with Beninese culture and its spiritual traditions, Pauline Guerrier immersed herself in the rituals and figures of Vodoun, focusing in particular on the Zangbeto, guardians of the night, and the Egungun, ancestors who return among the living. These mystical figures, protectors of the community and mediators between the visible and the invisible, inform a plastic and symbolic reflection at the core of her practice. Through installations made of fabrics dyed by the artist, cut, recomposed, and rematerialized, Pauline Guerrier gives rise to vibrant, colorful silhouettes that function as contemporary reinterpretations of these spiritual guardians.

This new body of work continues the trajectory of her international artistic research, notably initiated during her residency in India and presented in Brussels in the exhibition The Guardians. Through her travels from Benin to India, via Latin America and Europe, the artist observes, collects, and absorbs forms, gestures, colors, and rhythms drawn from ancestral ceremonies. From these experiences, she extracts a personal mythology composed of intertwined memories and living traditions, which she translates into a singular visual language.

Combining textile sculpture, installation, straw marquetry, drawing, and ritual presence, the works presented at Galeria Foco extend this exploration of universal protective figures. At the threshold between day and night, reality and imagination, Pauline Guerrier’s Zangbeto emerge as hybrid entities rooted in ancestral Beninese spirituality and reimagined through the artist’s contemporary gesture.