"What is it that you have to say about this world?"—this is the question artist Pauline-Rose Dumas has been asking herself all along. She attempts to answer it in her first solo exhibition in New York, presented at the invitation of HESSE FLATOW, the title of which draws inspiration from Gertrude Stein’s famous line, "Rose is a rose is a rose," from her poem Sacred Emily (1913). Naturally, you have noticed the tautological play on words the artist has linked to her own name.
A recipient of the 2026 Anni & Josef Albers Foundation residency program, Pauline-Rose Dumas recently spent two months in Bethany, CT amidst its lush, tranquil surroundings —the very place where the artist-designer couple of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College settled in the 1950s. Equipped with abundant inspiration and opportunities for research and introspection, Pauline-Rose puts the finishing touches on her installation.
It was thanks to the jury for the Albers Foundation’s residency selection—on which I served the year following my own residency—that I discovered the work of Pauline-Rose Dumas. Was it perhaps because I hail from a country—Japan—where the very definition of the arts is different? I was deeply struck by the ease with which she establishes a dialogue between conceptual art and the practice of applied arts—two distinct domains within the French tradition, which is historically marked by the separation of the fine arts and the decorative arts.
Pauline-Rose is an artist of matières, in the noble sense of that French term, which Anni and Josef Albers used to evoke the sensory and emotive aesthetic quality of materials. A graduate of the Chelsea College of Arts in Textile Design (London, 2019), she studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in Tatiana Trouvé’s studio (2022), where she discovered the art of blacksmithing. Textiles and metal—two seemingly disparate materials at first glance—dominate her creative practice, complemented by drawings, preparatory notes, and an entire narrative built upon a body of collected and printed images—much like a personal diary—that inhabits each of her pieces.
Pauline-Rose possesses an exceptional tactile sensibility. She visited me in my studio in Paris before her departure. During our conversation, she held in her hands a work I had created at the Manufacture de Sèvres—a piece resembling a color chart titled Matières of Colors—which was inspired by Anni Albers’s 1965 text “Tactile Sensibility”. She ran her fingers over each color as if perceiving its details through her skin. I cannot forget that moment—a moment in which I felt a profound sense of kinship—as I recalled this passage from the aforementioned work: “We touch things to assure ourselves of reality.”
In her studio in Montreuil, I was struck by the way she assembles details through micro-dimensional variations: delicate zooms, stretched time, deliberate blurring, chromatic gradients... For this artist, forms constitute a sensory alphabet. Despite their differing material properties, loops, squares, and rods coalesce amidst the light and intimacy of her workspace into organic silhouettes as fragile and frail as cast shadows. The elements that make up Pauline-Rose Dumas’s pieces stem from her daily practice: threads, needles, pins, spools, ribbons—even the finger rests from the scissors she uses to cut fabric. They appear simultaneously familiar and alien within the shifting scale, as if to suggest that one should be wary of the déjà-vu.
"For things such as tools call for action; objects of art, for meditation," wrote Anni Albers in her text "Designing” (1943). Clear-eyed and alert within a contemporary world fragmented by norms, and bolstered by her craftsmanship and deep knowledge of materials, Pauline-Rose Dumas grants herself the freedom of a marvelous contradiction: a sense of rootedness, firmness, rectitude, and the dignity of the gesture. It is the infinite softness of a peaceful lullaby, guiding us toward enchantment—somewhere between reverie and dream. All this, because: a Rose is a rose.
-- Sumiko Oé-Gottini
Artist, Color Design Researcher, and Independent Curator
Member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics)
In conjunction with her solo exhibition in Tribeca, HESSE FLATOW EAST presents Garden of Roses, a presentation of Dumas’s outdoor sculptural work at the gallery’s Amagansett location. Garden of Roses will be on view through August 8, 2026.
