Marguerite Humeau at White Cube

Marguerite Humeau, scintille, 16 January – 21 February 2026. © Marguerite Humeau. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska).

By LAURA LUO February 7th, 2026 

In her exhibition scintille at White Cube Gallery, Marguerite Humeau conjures a primordial cave where bats, stalagmites, fungi, and debris merge and morph into one another. Caves—sites of geological wonders, archaeological relics, and ecological sanctuary—have long fascinated Humeau. As Humeau developed her 2019 exhibition ECSTASIES from the Lascaux Caves in southwestern France, her visit to a cave in West Papua in early 2025 inspired the current exhibition. Humeau presents a selection of ten sculptures and ten works on paper, capturing the unsettling yet generative darkness of a cave, from which light and form emerge. 

The encounter with Humeau’s works unfolds phenomenologically. Upon entering the dimly lit gallery on the first floor, one’s vision briefly collapses before slowly recalibrating. Perception intensifies, as three sculptures emerge from the ground. In Centurience (all works are from 2025), two clusters of protruding tendrils—resembling either flower pistils or bones in a bat’s wings—unfurl from the pink nodes. This part flower, part bat being marks the cave’s entrance, gesturing viewers further into the darkness. Behind Centurience erupt two monumental cast-glass sculptures, Stillenary (The Guardian of the Emergence) and Softament (The Guardian of Mineral Memory). They lift the eye upward as they rise and taper in layered accretion, like stalagmites would from repeated mineral deposits. Precariously balancing atop, a stack of mirrored globes swells in size as they grow. As these two stalagmite-like formations hover between perfect stillness and apocalyptic collapse, one’s sense of balance also falters. 

Marguerite Humeau, Softament (The Guardian of Mineral Memory): the accumulation of tiny, repeated acts of faith that eventually create monuments. Change that comes from persistence, that is not grand, but is geological, slow, patient, almost invisible. Like minerals accumulating, one molecule at a time. The power that comes from the consistency of natural forces in action. Monuments built from yielding rather than force, structures we build by flowing rather than pushing, proving that water’s weakness is its greatest strength. 2025. Mineral aggregates, painted felt, tinted lacquer, blown glass, elixir for mineral memory (limestone, calcium, sulphur spring water, calcite, karst mineral water, biofilm gelatine). 377 x 120 x 108 cm | 148 7/16 x 47 1/4 x 42 1/2 in.© Marguerite Humeau. Photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis).

With the eye traveling upward, one discovers that the dimly lit gallery is an intentional result of a confetti-covered ceiling. The confetti, reminiscent of particles like ash, pebbles, or moss, transforms the gallery into a dark cave. Designers and architects Simon de Dreuille and Elena Seegers, in collaboration with Humeau, chose to scatter rectangular black paper confetti in the ceiling light fixtures to dim the space. “Particles are an unusual tool in spatial design,” explain de Dreuille and Seegers, “one we are particularly drawn to, as they create open situations with indeterminate patterns and a liminal atmosphere.”  The darkened ceiling becomes almost indistinguishable from the floor, rendering the perception of space topsy-turvy. Humeau further discusses the use of confetti in the gallery across two floors: “Downstairs in the cavern of the stalagmites we spread the confetti to mirror how the light is entering the ‘cave’, flowing the entrance, then rapidly disappearing into the dark. Upstairs in the gallery of the bats, the darkness is also intensifying as we reach the ‘deep cave zone’ where the colony of bats is roosting.”

In the “deep cave zone” on the second floor, a series of small cast-glass sculptures along with drawings inhabit the walls. These small sculptures, unlike the stalagmite-like sculptures downstairs, are decidedly more zoomorphic and bat-like. In The Grape Transformation, wing-like structures wrap around and enclose what seems like a cluster of embryos or grapes. The semitranslucent cast glass shifts in swirls of grey, purple, and orange, rendering the creature ethereal and mysterious. As with other sculptures on the second floor, Humeau developed The Grape Transformation with extensive research on bats’ anatomy and behaviors. The sculpture references bats’ embracing behaviors, where family members would huddle within each other’s wingspans for long periods of time. While the sinuous, rippling sculptures summon phenomenology of a cave—echoes of bats’ chittering and wings flapping could reverberate in the dark enclosure—the drawings shown nearby offer less immediacy.

Marguerite Humeau, scintille, 16 January – 21 February 2026. © Marguerite Humeau. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska).

Exiting the gallery into the daylight, one’s vision once again collapses briefly before recalibrating. Between the primordial cave and the streets of New York City, Humeau’s mythology sustains. The precarity of the near-collapsing stalagmites, the flutter of roosting bats, and the vertigo from the dark space are still viscerally felt in the body.

Marguerite Humeau: scintille is on view at White Cube New York through February 21, 2026. WM