A monster never exists independently of the gaze that names it.
From 5 November to 24 December 2026, PM GALLERY presents Les Monstres tendres (Tender Monsters), a group exhibition bringing together works by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Georges Spiro, Jean Marais, Niki de Saint Phalle, Catherine Gran and Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov. From Surrealist experiments to contemporary creatures, the exhibition explores how artists unsettle forms, reassemble bodies and bring objects to life, conjuring other realities from within the familiar.
The title is borrowed from the world of Catherine Gran, whose five paintings form the heart of the exhibition. Around her community of creatures with composite anatomies, the works on view set up a dialogue between generations and artistic practices, all shaped by metamorphosis, hybridity and objects diverted from their usual purpose.
Through these encounters, Les Monstres tendres approaches the monster less as a fixed figure than as a process of transformation. Boundaries begin to shift: between body and object, human and animal, the sacred and the familiar, the beautiful and the strange. And as these impossible creatures grow familiar, another question arises: why do we become attached to certain monsters? Perhaps because behind their extravagant anatomies, their clumsiness and their inconsistencies, they end up revealing something about ourselves.
Perhaps this is how these monsters finally become tender. The longer we look at them, their differences do not disappear: they become familiar. We grow attached to them not only because we learn to welcome their strangeness, but because something in them, their fragility, their contradictions or their awkward ways of being in the world, ends up resembling us.
PM GALLERY
40 rue de Seine, 75006 Paris
Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 7pm, and by appointment. Free admission.
Opening on Thursday 5 November, 6 - 8pm
