3 September - 21 October 2023
Patricia Dreyfus, L'île imaginaire
Left to right:
L'île imaginaire n° 39 (2022), wool and cotton, 140 x 105 cm
Frau Dreifuss (2023), embroidery on cotton, 100 x 70 cm
Lettre à moi-même (2019), embroidery on cotton, 210 x 150 cm
L'île imaginaire n° 39 (2022), wool and cotton, 140 x 105 cm
Frau Dreifuss (2023), embroidery on cotton, 100 x 70 cm
Lettre à moi-même (2019), embroidery on cotton, 210 x 150 cm
Patricia Dreyfus' work series entitled L'île imaginaire (The Imaginary Island), shows a surrealistic dreamworld which includes many different characters, ranging from fantasy creatures to floating houses or skulls. Her forms of expression are multiple: she writes and draws in fine lines, sometimes using colour pencils, as in this colorful series. In recent years, she began to transfer her primary drawings into either embroideries or tapestries, as is the case here. The tapestries on display in the exhibition are each based on a small drawing which was turned into a bigger format and produced as a tapestry by a specialised atelier in Belgium.
In this first show of Patricia Dreyfus’ work in our gallery in Brussels, we also included some of her bronze works – small heads, which Dreyfus calls her ‘talismans’ (or ‘lucky charms’), as well as embroideries, such as the work entitled Lettre à moi-même (Letter to Myself), which is based on a page of her diary.
In this first show of Patricia Dreyfus’ work in our gallery in Brussels, we also included some of her bronze works – small heads, which Dreyfus calls her ‘talismans’ (or ‘lucky charms’), as well as embroideries, such as the work entitled Lettre à moi-même (Letter to Myself), which is based on a page of her diary.
Patricia Dreyfus was born in Dakar (Senegal) in 1951. She went to school in Paris. At the age of 16, she left home to travel. A few years later, and until 1992, she worked as a film director in the fields of art, music and economics and won the best film award at the Biarritz Film Festival in 1987 with La rencontre au sommet. Her film work has been shown at the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Musée d'Art Moderne (Paris) and the Musée de Pontoise. In parallel, she studied art from 1982 to 1984, specialising in drawing and sculpture, at the Gregory Mazurovsky studio at the American Center and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, both in Paris. She lived in Basel from 1992 to 2012, devoting herself entirely to her artistic work. Since 2012, she has been living and working in Berlin and exhibiting internationally.