Christine-Aurore Magnee

The artist, Isabelle de Borchgrave, has taken a new turn in contemporary creation. She has created bronze sculptures, paintings and contemporary installations initiated by public commissions, institutions, international exhibitions, including Picasso's tour in France. She explores new themes from a new aesthetic perspective: painting, objects, installations, etc. The story begins under the roof of a small house in the Sablon that Isabelle has transformed into a workshop. She gives drawing lessons to her friends' and neighborhood children and thus thinks freely about her creations. We are in the '70s, and the Tour de Bébelle stands in front of us. Parades of hand-painted outfits, rolls of scattered fabrics, pigments, brushes, gouaches, canvases, pastels and travel diaries. They all rub shoulders in a friendly, colourful and modern atmosphere. Later, her favourite material was paper, which she would shape without precedent with an unprecedented originality of design. She exhibits everywhere, her creations are in various museums, at the moment an exhibition is touring the United States. Isabelle has enriched her palette by meeting all cultures: Western, Eastern, African, and this through the centuries of the history of art and painting. She appropriated these diverse cultures and their artisanal and contemporary know-how, while recreating the elements in her own style, using paper, acrylic paint, inks or pigments. His world has been transformed over time by his experience and his multiple interests. His appetite for knowledge is limitless. His mental library is astounding; His hands "bubble" like networks to create amazing shapes and images. After a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1994, Isabelle designed paper costumes. While keeping her brushes in hand and her canvases in mind, she has developed four large collections, all of paper and trompe l'oeil, which stage a very different universe each time. "Papiers à la Mode", the first, tells the story of 300 years of redesigned fashion history from Elizabeth I to Coco Chanel. "Mariano Fortuny" immerses us in the Venetian world of the 19th century. Pleats, veils and elegance are the key words of this story. "I Medici" takes us through the streets of Florence, where we meet the illustrious characters in their ceremonial attire. Characters who made the Renaissance a luminous period. Gilding, pearls, silk, velvet... The trompe l'oeil reaches a level of rediscovered sumptuousness. As for the "Ballets Russes", they pay a sustained tribute to Serge de Diaghilev while celebrating the work of Pablo Picasso, Léon Bakst, Henri Matisse... who designed the costumes for these ballets. "Isabelle de Borchgrave" has become a name that is commonly associated with fashion and paper, but it is also closely linked to the world of contemporary and modern art as well as design. By collaborating with Caspari, the Gien, Target, Villeroy and Boch earthenware factories... Through her sparkling imagination, Isabelle de Borchgrave takes us on a journey and makes us discover a multiple artistic network of variations that allow us to enter her aesthetic world filled with light, fantasy and implacable know-how. It is a whole set composed of: fabrics and wallpapers, table services, curtains, sheets, personalized decorations for parties and specialized events... All this makes up a sparkling universe in which she has always loved to evolve, which she has enriched with her personal experience and her own culture, immersion in the history of the arts. But in 50 years of work, she has never left aside what has always guided her in her life: painting. To this day, she exhibits her paintings and large pleats of paper all over the world, and has created bronze sculptures. His imagination is always on alert. Curious and open to the world, she happily navigates through the history of traditional and world arts and artistic customs. Isabelle, who is also a follower of the Nabis movement, reinterprets the world that unfolds around her like an infinite dream with shimmering colors. Today, his exploration of new contemporary horizons through original creations and renewed themes actively demonstrates this.