For over twenty years, Mona Oren has been developing a unique sculptural oeuvre, rooted in matter, gesture, and time. While her work regularly involves drawing, photography, video, and installation, it is sculpture—and more specifically wax sculpture—that constitutes its center of gravity.
Contrary to tradition, which considers wax a transitory medium, preparatory to bronze casting, Mona Oren uses it as a final material, an artistic language in its own right, of extreme delicacy. She chooses this material for its organic, sensual, and vulnerable dimension, and for its ability to embody impermanence: wax melts, evolves, and acquires a patina over time, but always retains the trace of gesture and emotion.
Made from a subtle blend of animal, vegetable, and mineral waxes, worked using processes she has long perfected, the wax becomes skin, flower, breath, and memory in her hands. Each work is constructed in thin layers, using silicone, plaster, or resin molds, until it reaches tiny thicknesses, sometimes only one or two millimeters. The result: pure, almost translucent forms that capture the light and the gaze in a constant interplay between strength and fragility.
Winner of the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Intelligence of the Hand® in 2018, Mona Oren has established herself as a contemporary wax maker, at the intersection of art, craftsmanship, and research. For several years, she has been conducting an in-depth exploration of white wax, with a demand for precision and an almost alchemical attention to the material's reactions. This in-depth work recently took her to Japan, during residencies at Villa Kujoyama in 2022 and 2025, where she discovered Hazé vegetable wax made from tallow trees. Seduced by its finesse and the affinities between Japanese craftsmanship and her own practice, she is now pursuing a new phase of research there, also incorporating other materials such as rice wax, Washi paper, and Sumi ink.
Over the years, her practice has evolved from an inspiration initially fueled by nature and the plant world to a more abstract, introspective expression, blending symbolism, modesty, sensuality, and discreet humor. Each piece becomes a fragment of history, a sensitive trace of the ephemeral, which the artist situates in installations, photographs, or videos, playing on transpositions of scale and temporality.
Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, in France and abroad. She also collaborates with luxury brands such as Guerlain, Dior, and Chaumet, and develops a practice of transmission, which she considers essential: she trains apprentices in her workshop, teaches at the Ateliers Terre & Feu in Paris, and regularly leads workshops in prestigious schools and institutions.
With work that is both demanding and poetic, Mona Oren sculpts wax as one writes a poem: in thin layers, in silences and in lights. She explores the tension between what fades and what remains, making this unstable material a true medium of memory, of the sensitive, and of the living.
