FIGURES - Catherine Seher
French painter Catherine Seher (lives and works in Paris) conjures a powerful sense of anonymity and isolation within her body of work. Capturing the essence of a given environment - striking views that often depict figures within various landscapes - but extracting from it any signifiers of meaning, Seher thus reduces the art of both the landscape and the figure to its most element, forcing the viewer of her work to consider the very mechanics by which each component of the work is created. The result is a body of work that taps into the universality of art itself, one anonymous figure or vista at a time.
Born in Paris in 1958, Seher graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1983. Today she is based in Paris but has enjoyed the showcase of her work in locales across Europe. Recent exhibitions of her work include those at Galerie Christine Colon, Liege (20); Galerie GNG, Paris (2020); Galerie Peters-Barenbrock, Berlin (2019) and Galerie Biesenbach, Cologne (2020).
An artist of great sensitivity, she speaks of her work as follows: "To paint is to venture into the unknown, that's where my daily journey begins... the canvas very quickly becomes a passage towards dreamlike worlds where landscapes follow one another, dense then bare, where silhouettes appear and disappear... In the end I keep what I have imposed after much struggle and thickness of paint. These ageless characters who often come without my knowledge, seem to hold some secret, nimbus witnesses of the reflections of the world.”
The writer Huguette Hérin-Travers, who is one of her collectors, also expresses herself: "Catherine Seher's paintings are filled with characters that are evanescently inscribed in a landscape where the boundaries and landmarks disappear. The anonymous silhouettes give us a vision of a dismantled world, but one that is full of meaning. We are in a troubling face to face. Strange characters hail us, while their eyes are already guiding us towards what is to come, and we are introduced into a world of suggested thoughts. The spectator is thus questioned and then concerned by these images evoking spontaneous, almost magical expressions. One finds there the force of the first gestures, the most intimate forms...."
Biography
1958 born in Paris
1983 DSAP, École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris
Born in Paris in 1958, Seher graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1983. Today she is based in Paris but has enjoyed the showcase of her work in locales across Europe. Recent exhibitions of her work include those at Galerie Christine Colon, Liege (20); Galerie GNG, Paris (2020); Galerie Peters-Barenbrock, Berlin (2019) and Galerie Biesenbach, Cologne (2020).
An artist of great sensitivity, she speaks of her work as follows: "To paint is to venture into the unknown, that's where my daily journey begins... the canvas very quickly becomes a passage towards dreamlike worlds where landscapes follow one another, dense then bare, where silhouettes appear and disappear... In the end I keep what I have imposed after much struggle and thickness of paint. These ageless characters who often come without my knowledge, seem to hold some secret, nimbus witnesses of the reflections of the world.”
The writer Huguette Hérin-Travers, who is one of her collectors, also expresses herself: "Catherine Seher's paintings are filled with characters that are evanescently inscribed in a landscape where the boundaries and landmarks disappear. The anonymous silhouettes give us a vision of a dismantled world, but one that is full of meaning. We are in a troubling face to face. Strange characters hail us, while their eyes are already guiding us towards what is to come, and we are introduced into a world of suggested thoughts. The spectator is thus questioned and then concerned by these images evoking spontaneous, almost magical expressions. One finds there the force of the first gestures, the most intimate forms...."
Biography
1958 born in Paris
1983 DSAP, École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris
