Army, 2011

Delphine Lebourgeois Biography

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. Delphine is fascinated by hats and other head-dresses and many of her figures are adorned by a piece of eccentric millinery, sometimes no less than a fragment of land or a genealogy tree. These headpieces act as poetic metaphors hinting at the subject’s emotions, dreams and aspirations.

Following "Army" and “Déesse V - Nine Goodbye Kisses", her later collages explore the discrepancy between narrative and decorative. Exploring the process of repetition, all the characters in these two images have the same bodies (literally cut and pasted), while the heads are different. Lines and colours are layered and entwined in a rich and colourful graphic ‘lace’ which in some parts become nearly abstract; any break in the pattern acting as a door for a story to enter.

The artist states: “In my images, patterns are disconnected from their usual meaning-free connotations, suddenly bearing the weight of uniqueness and ceasing to be all ‘together’. Their role is to reunite the ornamental with the conceptual, to bring together the specifications of the purely decorative with the original qualities of story telling. Furthermore, by taking the pattern out of its usual decorative context and mixing it with other unique elements, my aim is to give it a meaning...maybe an allusion to the obsessional nature of the creative process”

Born in 1976, Delphine Lebourgeois is a graduate of Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in her native France and Central St Martins, London. She has been working in the British capital as an artist and illustrator for more than ten years. London solo shows include "Amazons and Other Stories" and more recently “Over the Cover". She has won the Images 29 Critics Award and one of four artists nominated by public vote for the Club Monaco Emerging Artist Award.