TIGHT INTO A BALL
(édition en anglais)

Katrien de Blauwer turned to the photography magazines in Karl Lagerfeld’s library at 7L as both source and mirror. Drawn to a particular period – the late 1920s and into the 1930s – she found herself moving through frozen images of people mid-transformation : bodies compressed into legibility by the camera, lives fixed onto paper. Working though a Woolfian lens, she made a series of work that borrows these figures to tell a story that is, as usual, personal. The title of the installation comes from a single line taken from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931): “Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball.“ Six paper balls — one for each of Virginia Woolf’s six characters — are installed in the space. Around them, on the walls, the twenty-nine photomontages unfold, tracing the same arcas the novel itself, a single day, from sunrise to sunset.

This installation (on view from September 17 to November 7, 2026) was created as part of the Correspondances program, in which artists are invited to explore the collection of Karl Lagerfeld’s library at 7L and reinterpret it through their own perspective. An eponymous book of the exhibition is published by the Éditions 7L