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French oil pastel with mixed media of African influence
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Sauter les Frontiérres
"Her canvases blur the line between memory and fantasy, childhood and adult feeling — a world entirely her own, painted with remarkable emotional intensity."
Véronique Wirbel (1950–1990) was a French painter whose work inhabits a world entirely her own — populated by hybrid creatures, fractured figures, and dreamlike forms that blur the line between memory and fantasy, childhood and adult feeling. Working in gouache, acrylic, and watercolor, she produced a body of work of remarkable emotional intensity in a career cut short at forty. Her paintings are held in private collections internationally and continue to attract collector attention across European auction markets.
T. Botero Galleries holds original works by Wirbel available exclusively to the trade.
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Véronique WirbelFrench oil pastel with mixed media of African influenceOil Pastel11 X 8.5tampon d'atelierShow More
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"Véronique Wirbel populated her canvases with hybrid creatures, fractured figures, and dreamlike forms drawn from the deepest reserves of imagination and memory."
Véronique Wirbel (1950–1990) was a French painter whose brief career produced a body of work of singular strangeness and emotional power. Working in gouache, acrylic, and watercolor, she populated her canvases with hybrid creatures, part-human figures, animals, and dreamlike forms drawn from the deepest reserves of imagination and memory. Her world was not the world as observed, but the world as felt — one where the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the real and the fantastical, dissolved entirely.
Her work has been described as a kind of Wonderland: not the orderly fantasy of fairy tale, but something more unsettling and more personal. The figures that inhabit her paintings carry within them both the memories and dreams of childhood and the full weight of adult feeling — joy, solitude, longing, mortality. Works such as S'en fout la mort (1990) and Les tourbillons de la vie (1990), painted in the final year of her life, demonstrate a painter at the height of her powers — large-scale, chromatic, and completely unafraid.
Wirbel worked across four decades of output compressed into a career of just forty years. Her paintings have appeared at auction houses across Europe and are held in private collections internationally. T. Botero Galleries holds original works by Wirbel available exclusively to the trade.