The original work of three French artists Eponine Saint Hillier, Monique B. and Murielle Argoud will be on display at Agora Gallery, NYC.
About Eponine Saint Hillier
Eponine Saint Hillier is a relentlessly innovative artist whose work stretches the boundaries of painting. Saint Hillier depicts the traditional human body, but with a clash of painting practices – splashes appear over carefully-wrought surfaces, with realistic forms sharing the same space as abstract – or with atypical media. Even her technically straightforward oil paintings are arresting for their subjects’ direct gaze and surreal, beautiful use of color. Saint Hillier’s latest series is a combination of old and new techniques she calls “living painting.” She applies paint directly to a model’s body in swirling, charged colors that heighten and embroider the planes of the human shape. Then those models are photographed against a painted background to create a trompe-l’oeil effect that plays with depth, form, and above all, reality. The images combine the artifice of aggressive, visible brushstrokes with photographic concreteness – a true mix of media.
Eponine Saint Hillier was born in France, where she lives today. She has also lived in Polynesia and exhibits her work extensively in France, Belgium, Portugal and the United States.
About Monique B.
Within the depths of Monique B.’s emotive and atmospheric paintings one discovers a passionately fiery and energetic force surging to the surface. As she paints, Monique infuses herself into her creations, allowing her inner thoughts and emotions to permeate the layers of pigment. She brings to life works of intense drama and power, exposing a poignant vision of her soul’s journey in paint. Inspired by the artist’s time in New York City, these paintings are often evocative of cityscapes, whether realistically captured or pure abstractions hinting at the upward force and energy of skyscrapers clustered along the coast. Monique builds her works in acrylic paint on canvas, moving between a highly textured and expressive mark and a softer and more considered atmospheric brushstroke.
Born in Germany to a German mother and French father, and brought up in France, Monique was raised bilingually and was encouraged to express her creative spirit from an early age, participating competitions and by mimicking her grandfather's paintings. Self-taught as an artist, her works now appear in exhibitions and collections throughout Europe, including permanent exhibitions in France.
About Murielle Argoud
The appealing subtlety and sincerity of Murielle Argoud’s paintings is found in an expressive abstraction of secrets and metamorphosis, distilling a visual poetry from pigments and sand. At the heart of Argoud’s art is a sense of transformation and an appreciation for the natural world, as enigmatic suggestions of landscapes seem to linger beneath the surface, waiting but never fully unveiled from within her delicate and turbulent brushstrokes. Argoud builds her works in layers of oil and acrylic paints, peppered with mixed media elements, lava, sand, gold leaf, and prints, as her surfaces move fluidly between a rough and choppy texture and an atmospheric softness.
A poet and painter from a very early age, Argoud studied with several distinguished artists and attended art schools in Lyon, Nuremberg, and Tuscany before setting out on her own as a professional artist and teacher. Born in Lyon, France to a family of French and Andalusian descent, Argoud now lives and works on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
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