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About Helene Michel

Hélène Michel draws her inspiration from Art History, revisiting the great masters of painting, appropriating their styles and certain details or fragments of paintings in order to create pictorial interactions by mixing classical painting with the formal and contemporary play of new compositions.

Born in 1971, Héléne Michel is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art(s) de Paris-Cergy. Very quickly, the artist enters a monumental painting workshop in which she will perfect her technique, practicing daily to paint in a realistic way what surrounds her, what she observes. Over the years, she has created hundreds of sets, customizing each bare wall with decorative paintings or real trompe-l'oeil, playing with visual effects, textures and materials with the most complex perspectives.

Helene Michel - vue d'exposition

20 years of experience during which Hélène Michel will push her technique to perfection. Handling building paints, urban aerosol paint and acrylic tubes, moving from the scaffolding platform to the easel paint, Hélène Michel alternates between the site conditions and the tranquility of the workshop. Her works reveal this transversality even in his technique, which combines acrylic paint with aerosol or even building paints, giving a particular place to graphics or punctuation of writing.

Her work questions painting in the literal and figurative sense as a constant reference to codes among which she likes to make artistic practices coexist. Its questioning is based on the representation of the different genres and how they can still survive over time. She approaches the notion of the gaze through the idea of pretence, plays with framing, assembly and juxtaposition of paintings as a punctuation of writings and formats. What interests her is to confront images, to handle contrasts.

There is pastiche and diversion that the artist invites us to look at, she establishes a dialogue between past and present in order to share with us this iconographic, technical and graphic mixture. It is a figurative painting that takes on its full meaning in interpretation.

Exhibitions (resume)

2019 - Centro Cultural San Marcos, Tolède, Espagne
2018 - Galerie Montesquieu, Agen, « Peintures combinatoires »
2017 - Galerie des Tanneries, Nérac, « Transpositions »
2017 - Villa Duconténia, Saint-Jean-de-Luz
2017 - Galerie Médiathèque, Rueil-Malmaison « Etudes Napoléon »
2016 - Espace Interface, Paris « La peinture Icônique »
2016 - Château Conti, L’Isle Adam
2015 - Galerie du Fort, Montauban
2014 - Centre culturel André Malraux, Agen  
2013 - Hors les murs « Artifices », Agen
2009 - « Artistes à Nishinomiya », Japon