Edwige Fouvry

"Painting is a place to dream, where you can let the imagination fly, a kind of bubble outside the world"» 

Edwige Fouvry

Edwige Fouvry was born in Nantes, France, in 1970, and currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. She received her master’s degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels, in 1996. She has exhibited widely across Europe and North America and participated in the 2011 group exhibition HEADS, curated by Peter Selz, at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Art Ltd., and Artension. This will be her fourth solo exhibition at the gallery (Dolby Chadwick Gallery).

Although clearly embedded in a visual awareness of the physical world, Edwige Fouvry’s paintings are never made directly from life. Instead, they are complex syntheses wrought by her imagination. By knitting together childhood recollections, photographs old and new, the moving world seen from the windows of trains, stills harvested from the television set and other media, Fouvry pursues an “emotional truth” in which the recorded, the remembered, and the imagined must each play a role.

The evolution of Fouvry’s style since her days at Belgium’s prestigious La Cambre school has been, in a very important sense, a process of simplification. While she has added extensively to her repertoire over the years, she has at the same time gradually stripped from her work any affect that emphasizes concept over the viewer’s personal encounter with the work. Even the complexity of external narrative has been plucked away, leaving in its place the self-sufficiency, the immediacy, and the generous elasticity of poetry. Her art is a door through which she invites us to visit a deeply personal, deeply subjective, space, to have an experience that is far more sensual than notional, far more emotional than theoretical.

Tadzio Koelb