Since « Sasha », i.e. the series she dedicated to her daughter and the gateway between childhood and adolescence and then to young woman, which series was on intimist and dreamlike modes, close to a

fairy tale, Claudine Doury keeps questioning adolescence, i.e. this intervening period of age, body and time, both fragile and violent.

Whereas men would only fleetingly appear as an extra, in her previous pictures, this time they are at the heart of « The New Man » which is a series entirely made in St Petersburg. This series echoes both the revolutionary imperative of Bolshevism of course and also this moment of slough and transformation when the adolescent boy hatches into a man.This is an intervening period, the crossing of a border, a real metamorphosis. The artist keeps on trying to capture and decode this moment so special and unique of a crisis and the coming to oneself.

By doing so, she questions both the male identity – what does becoming a man really mean ? And becoming a man in Russia i.e. in a changing country, which is completely different from the former USSR at

the time of cold war and iron curtains ? – and also and maybe more radically she positions herself like awoman who dares at last to look at men.

As men have always done, during centuries, no matter what their age and most evidently with women. […]