Empress

Danysz Gallery present Empress , a solo exhibition by Yseult Digan, aka YZ. A leading figure in contemporary urban art, YZ takes over the gallery to crown ten years of work dedicated to her Empress series, she exhibits works retracing the different stages of her series, which began in 2015 at the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing. 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 exper iences in Ivory coast, Colombia, Thailand, Morocco, or France, she creates portraits of powerful women, always rendered in black and white, dressedwith traditional garments, adorned with ancestral jewellery, and embodying the richness of cultures too often overlooked. Her Empresses are not only icons, but real, inspiring, self-assured women. Their gazes, painted with striking intensity, confront the viewer. 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. 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. The presence of these portraits is intense, the gaze of the women equally intense. 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 centred 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 memories, and the women bec ome messengers.The gallery’s upper floor offers an immersive discovery of these Ogham. By sharing this ancestral culture through her portraits, Yseult YZ Digan also invites us to reconnect with a nature that can feel distant within our urban environment. 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. Empress is a universal series that spans the globe.