MIREILLE BLANC

Mireille Blanc’s paintings approach reality as an enigma: caught between the familiarity of everyday life, and the strangeness of time’s passing, the objects and photographic documents she frames and filters hold multiple meanings as both witnesses and subjects. Focusing on the minute details of image production and circulation in contemporary life, she intuitively reworks found and personal photographs to arrive at a middle ground between abstraction and sediments of memory, in compositions that blur the line between background and figure, often by reversing scales and ornamental patterns. 

The artist often turns her attention to details from ceremonial moments of everyday life: birthday cakes, decorative balloons, kitsch souvenirs and used gift wraps take center stage as objects depicted at the brink of decay, in an instant right before they lose their spectacular function and become discarded and distorted, in a nod to entropy and the mortality of images. The lush textures of cream, chocolate or icing are reproduced through the materiality of oil paint in depicting highly ornamental cakes and pastries of various sizes and colors. They are sometimes half eaten, sometimes losing form behind a glass patisserie display, caught in the process of becoming documents of their own material demise. Another recurrent theme is found on commercial prints of canonical works of art, for instance a Van Gogh printed on a sweatshirt, worn, torn and folded with the movements of a body, or a reproduction hanging on a wall, gathering dust and losing its vibrancy through exposure to sunlight. In each one of these instances, the layering of the image allows the process to gain visibility: sometimes a plastic folder is present, more often pieces of tape or staples used to hold the photograph in place become part of the painterly depiction, pointing to original images as material documents that circulate in the world, exposed to the elements and the passing of time. 

Born in 1985 in Saint-Avold, Mireille Blanc lives and works in Évry, France.

She studied at the Beaux-arts de Paris (2009), and at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London (2007). Her work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at Anne-Sarah Bénichou Gallery (Paris, 2023), Espace d'art contemporain Camille Lambert, (Juvisy-sur-Orge, 2021), THE PILL (Istanbul, 2019), FRAC Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand, 2018), and in group exhibitions at La Verrière, Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, (Brussels, 2023), Musée des Sables d’Olonnes, (2023), MO.CO La Panacée (Montpellier, 2023), Beaux-Arts de Paris (2023), MASC - Musée d’Art Moderne & Contemporain (Les Sables d’Olonne, 2023), Centre d’Art ‘A cent mètres du centre du monde’ (Perpignan, 2021), Musée Rolin (Autun, 2020), Lieu Unique (Nantes, 2019), Kunstwerk Carlhütte (Hamburg, 2019), Musée Crozatier (Le Puy-en-Velay, 2018), Musée des Beaux-arts de Dole (2017).

Mireille Blanc was the recipient of the Prix Verdaguer (Académie des Beaux-arts, 2021) and the Prix international de peinture Novembre à Vitry (2016). Her work is part of important public and private collections such as Fonds d'Art Contemporain – Paris Collections, MASC – Musée d'Art Contemporain des Sables d'Olonne, Soho House Paris, FRAC Auvergne.