In a cavernous gallery beneath the iron-and-glass vaults of the Grand Palais in Paris, a forest of cardboard rises from the floor like a memory of something you have never quite seen. Columns are swallowed by vines. Domes curve overhead like the ceilings of forgotten temples. A bronze tree casts a shadow across a carpet of cut paper roots. This is Grottesco, the 2025 solo exhibition by Eva Jospin, and it is, by most reasonable measures, the most talked-about show in the French capital right now. That it is made almost entirely of packaging material is a fact that seems to delight and unsettle audiences in equal measure.
The Sculptor Who Sees Forests in Flatpack
Eva Jospin was born in Paris in 1975, studied architecture before switching to painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and arrived at sculpture almost by accident. As a young graduate with more ambition than budget, she began scavenging discarded cardboard boxes from the streets of the capital – free, abundant, and astonishingly responsive to the knife. What began as a practical solution became an obsession. For over fifteen years, Jospin has layered, carved, sanded, and assembled corrugated cardboard into immersive landscapes: forests so detailed they seem to breathe, architectural follies so intricate they rival the Baroque originals that inspired them.
“When you use cardboard in an art piece, you will have a constant vibration that is impossible to recreate with something flat. This is really like the work of sculpture – it’s carving,” Jospin has explained. The material’s structure – two layers of smooth paper sandwiching a wavy core – means that light and shadow are already embedded within it. “It’s an incredible material because as a sculpture, all the question of sculpture is the shadow,” she has said. “So it’s always something that plays with shadow, and the cardboard contains its own.”
That insight – that a material designed to protect the contents of shipping boxes already carries within it the principles of sculpture – separates genuine artistic intelligence from mere cleverness. Jospin does not use cardboard despite its limitations; she uses it because of them.
From the Louvre to Versailles: A Trail of Institutional Triumph
The trajectory of Jospin’s career reads like a map of France’s most revered cultural landmarks. In 2016, she installed Panorama in the Cour Carrée du Louvre – a monumental cardboard forest in one of the most photographed courtyards in the world. In 2020, she filled the Abbey of Montmajour in Arles with Cénotaph, a haunting meditation on absence and ruin. In 2023, the Palais des Papes in Avignon hosted Palazzo, transforming the medieval papal palace into a theatrical landscape of grottoes and follies. And in 2024, the Orangerie at the Château de Versailles presented Eva Jospin – Versailles, the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date – a show that included monumental embroidered panels originally created for the Dior haute couture runway in 2021.
That Dior connection has proved significant. Jospin designed the sets for Dior’s Haute Couture 2021–22 show and the Spring/Summer 2023 collection, creating sculpted forests that turned the runway into something closer to a clearing in an enchanted wood. The collaboration introduced her work to a global luxury audience, but it also raised a question that runs through her entire practice: what happens when a material associated with disposal is placed at the centre of a spectacle of excess?
Grottesco: Rome’s Buried Palace, Reimagined in Paper
The Grottesco exhibition at the Grand Palais, on view from December 2025 through March 2026, represents Jospin’s most ambitious statement to date. The title references a legend from late fifteenth-century Rome, when a young man stumbled into a cave and discovered buried frescoes from Nero’s Domus Aurea – the Golden House. Painters who descended into what they believed were underground grottoes found instead rooms adorned with fantastical hybrid creatures, flowing arabesques, and playful combinations of human, animal, and plant forms. From this discovery, the artistic style known as “grotesque” was born: a tradition in which the vegetal, the architectural, and the mythological intertwine without hierarchy.
Jospin’s response to this history is characteristically layered. More than twenty works fill the Grand Palais galleries, including several created specifically for the exhibition and unveiled for the first time. Columns crawl with cardboard vines. Intricate domes surround visitors like grottos. Petrified forests – frozen in time like an ancient civilisation – sit alongside embroidered bas-reliefs, a new technique for the artist that fuses textile and sculpture. The Grand Palais’s own architectural vocabulary of iron arches and glass domes provides an uncanny echo of Jospin’s own forms.
Crucially, Jospin left the gallery’s windows uncovered. Visitors are reminded, even in the depths of her cardboard underworld, that they are in Paris. The decision is a deliberate provocation: complete immersion would be a lie, and Jospin’s art is, above all, about the honest revelation of illusion. “I create spaces to live in, places where visitors can enter, get closer and let themselves be absorbed by the details,” she has said. “My works offer a journey towards an inexplicable and inexhaustible source: we never find it, and it’s this mystery that brings us back to it. What counts is each person’s experience, rather than the transmission of a precise message.”
Into the Woods: America Finally Takes Notice
If 2025 belonged to Paris, 2026 belongs to Savannah, Georgia. Into the Woods, Jospin’s debut American museum exhibition, opened at the SCAD Museum of Art in February as part of the institution’s deFINE ART 2026 programme, curated by chief curator Daniel S. Palmer.
The significance of the American debut should not be understated. Despite exhibiting internationally for over a decade – at the Palais de Tokyo, the Hayward Gallery in London, and the Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch – Jospin had never had a solo museum show in the United States. Into the Woods corrects that omission, presenting what the SCAD Museum describes as “the unique nuance of her singular practice” to an American public.
Simultaneously, in São Paulo, the exhibition Re-selvagem – Invented Nature at Casa Bradesco’s Cidade Matarazzo brought Jospin’s corrugated cardboard forests to a Brazilian audience in late 2025. “The forest is like the subconscious, the synapses of the brain,” Jospin has observed. “It is rich in mythology and narratives from different cultures.”
The Embroidered Dimension
One of the most significant developments in Jospin’s recent practice is her expansion into embroidery. Working with Indian artisans, she has created large-scale textile landscapes in which lush vegetation merges with hollow gates, arch portals, and architectural ruins. These embroidered works – first developed for Dior in 2021 with La Chambre de Soie – represent a deepening of her engagement with ornament, a concept she treats not as decoration but as a philosophical proposition.
The Grottesco exhibition introduced embroidered bas-reliefs, a technique that fuses textile and sculpture in a way Jospin had not previously attempted. The interplay between the tactile warmth of thread and the structural rigidity of cardboard creates a tension that mirrors the broader themes of her work: the boundary between the natural and the constructed, the permanent and the ephemeral, the hand-made and the industrial.
Her ink drawings – monochromatic, densely layered, and produced since childhood – function simultaneously as independent artworks and as preparatory studies, what the Italian tradition calls cartone: a cartoon, or, literally, cardboard. The circle completes itself.
Cardboard, Ecology, and the Ruins of Late Capitalism
There is an unavoidable ecological dimension to Jospin’s choice of material. Cardboard is the debris of the global supply chain – the residue of consumption, the packaging that protects objects we purchase and then discard. To build cathedrals from it is to perform a kind of secular transubstantiation: waste becomes wonder. But the transformation is not entirely comfortable, and Jospin knows it.
“Today, we say we should not produce, but we will always produce. It’s impossible,” she has remarked. “We have to change everything, and we know that.” The fantasy channelled by the images she creates proves that entropy can be curbed and metamorphosed into beauty. “It’s such a complicated thing to change, but just the idea of not producing any more – because we need that to live, we need to do it – it’s too important, too crazy.”
The Jungian analyst Alicja Głuszek, writing in Contemporary Lynx, has identified a deeper psychological resonance: Jospin’s cardboard ruins embody both the shadow and the light of the self, the hidden, unconscious, repressed aspects of identity alongside our social awareness. “Cardboard, as Eva herself once commented, includes in its structural composition light and shadow,” Głuszek observes.
A Quiet Radicalism
What makes Eva Jospin genuinely radical is not the scale of her ambition, though it is formidable, nor the beauty of her creations, though it is undeniable. It is her insistence on remaining rooted in a material that most of the art world considers beneath consideration. In an era when contemporary sculpture increasingly means digital fabrication, immersive technology, or spectacle, Jospin works with a box-cutter and patience. Her first cardboard sculpture took three months. The largest works in Grottesco occupy entire rooms.
She is represented by Galleria Continua, and her work has entered the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne. In 2024, she became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the sculpture section. And yet there remains something deliberately, stubbornly modest about her practice – a refusal to abandon the material that made her, even as the art market pushes her towards bronze, marble, or digital permanence.
“It has become definitive in my work because it allows me to create durable works while expressing a certain vulnerability that reflects the relationship to living things and nature,” Jospin has said of cardboard. The paradox is precise: durability through fragility, monumentality through refuse, enchantment through the most ordinary of means. In the cardboard cathedrals of Eva Jospin, the everyday and the extraordinary occupy the same space, and the viewer is invited to wander freely between them.
Eva Jospin: Grottesco is on view at the Grand Palais, Paris, through 15 March 2026. Into the Woods is at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, through 7 June 2026.
