Delphine Lebourgeois (b. 1976), a graduate from Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and from Central St Martins, has been working in London as an artist and illustrator for more than ten years.
Intuitive and fuelled with romantic visions, Lebourgeois' images are collages in their making as well as in the way the ideas are built: incongruous elements play with each other and grow organically into a beautiful, and surreal universe. In the majority of her works, the figures are adorned by a piece of eccentric millinery, poetic metaphors hinting at the subject’s emotions like in her latest series of drawings “Volcano”.
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With the use of repetitive or patterned elements , Lebourgeois' images often depict “army-like” groups of women. Her lines and colours are layered and entwined in a rich and colourful graphic lace which in some parts become nearly abstract:
“I have been looking at broken patterns in many of my recent works. Most of my characters have the same bodies (literally traced or “cut and pasted”) but the heads are different and provide the image with content. In that sense, patterns are disconnected from their usual meaning-free connotations. They suddenly bear the weight of uniqueness and cease to be all together. Their role is to combine the ornamental with the conceptual, to bring together the specifications of the solely-decorative with the original qualities of story-telling. By taking the pattern out of its usual decorative context and mixing it with other unique elements, my intention is to give it a meaning...maybe alluding to the obsessional nature of the creative process.”
Delphine Lebourgeois was the winner of the Images 29 Critics Award. She was also nominated by public vote for the Club Monaco Emerging Artist Award in November 2011, and is currently featured as one of the 5 Artists to watch on ArtFinder.
Photography by Jim Clarke
