THe ARTIST
Denise Brimson was twenty years old when she left her homeland in the Indian Ocean, Reunion Island, to complete her studies in French Literature at Aix-en-Provence University, in Southern France. She went on to work at the French Embassy in New York for several years, before moving to London. Driven by a longstanding urge for artistic expression, Denise studied drawing at the Hertforshire College of Art and Design and later joined the Fine Art Studios (Ateliers des Beaux-Arts) of la Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, directed by Jacqueline Georges Deyme and Jean-Marc Lange (First Prize winners of the Grand Prix de Rome).
It was there that Denise made her first encounter with sculpture and its "never-ending drawings in space", swiftly moving away from a traditional approach to focus on the rounded volumes and evocative curves of her models. Since 1997, Denise has dedicated herself entirely to sculpture in her studio in the Yvelines, near Paris. Her works have been widely exhibited in galleries and institutions in France and across the world, as well as group shows such as Salon d’Automne, S.N.B.A. (Salon National des Beaux-Arts) and Figuration Critique, where her works are displayed every year.
"I was born and spent twenty years on an island where Nature spreads its sensual, generous, loud and colourful presence everywhere. I then discovered Northern Europe and its contrasts. Apples and pears, colocynths and calabashes, all these fruits I represent are but means of celebrating nature, birth and Life - and with them, beauty and love, these heavenly bounties we so deeply depend on.
All the while never forgetting the fragility of their physical presence on Earth, as ephemeral and ever-changing as the human forms that appear within the curved surfaces of the purest, heftiest pear as well as the most withered of apple cores. Caught between these two opposite yet complementary worlds, in the area of turbulence between yin and yang, so difficult to stabilise, I simply long to express some of this with humour, tenderness and poetry, essential spices of life."
"Everything I seek to translate revolves around the deep feeling that all species, worlds and lives are intertwined... The organic realm which shows through my sculptures' evocative shapes interpenetrates the animal kingdom (and hence that of mankind), all united by the same fate, all subjected to the same laws of Nature, all caught up in the inescapable spiral of life...
'To be born, to live and to pass'... under a multitude of forms. As Diderot expressed it so wonderfully: 'All beings circulate within one another. Everything is in perpetual flux. All animals are more or less men, all minerals are more or less plants, all plants are more or less animals. There is only one great individual: the Totality. To be born, to live and to die is merely to change form."
Denise's early years at the ASSARTX, at la Celle-Saint-Cloud, in the studios run by Jean-Marc Lange and Jacqueline Georges Deyme:
