User:Afilol123/Sabine Monirys

Sabine Monirys, Born in Oran on 10 December 1936, Sabine Monirys was a self-taught artist.

Biography
In the early 1960s, “Sabine” (as she signed her works at the time) made naive paintings in which a little girl gets lost in sceneries distorted by dreams.

Her circle at the time included the Chinese painter San-yu as well as Jan Voss, Cheval-Bertrand, Lourdes Castro, Roland Topor and Guy de Cointet, whom she had known since adolescence.

Married to Jacques Monory with whom she had a son, Sabine became friends with the photographer Robert Frank, who had just published The Americans.

In 1967, Sabine met Jérôme Savary, director of the Grand Magic Circus. They fell madly in love. Pregnant with her second son, she was the heroine of Letizia, a photo-novel conceived by Savary for the Milan-based magazine Ali Baba.

She worked with the Grand Magic Circus, illustrated a children’s book with Jacques Prévert and another with Roland Topor.

In her studio on Rue Santos-Dumont, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where she moved with her sons Antoine and Robinson in 1974, Sabine began working on large-format canvases which she signed “Sabine Monirys.”

Her paintings became more confident, melding tragedy and tender irony.

Her literary passions (Handke, Woolf, Bernhard, Walser) came to the fore in her singular choice of titles or phrases, which she collected in notebooks and then affixed to her works.

She had her first solo exhibition at the Fred Lanzenberg gallery in Brussels in 1975.

Two others followed in Paris: at Galerie du Rhinocéros in 1976 and Galerie Krief & Raymond in 1979.

Monirys contributed to various magazines (Daily-Bul & Co, Sorcières, etc.) and took part in a number of group exhibitions. Her work was championed by critics such as Alain Jouffroy, Pierre Gaudibert, Gilbert Lascaut, and Olivier Kaepplin, as well as the eminent critic at Le Matin de Paris, Maïten Bouisset.

In 1977, Monirys took part in the Saõ Paulo Biennial. Her increasingly accomplished paintings registered the violence of the world, often taking inspiration from press photos.

In 1980, she exhibited at the Venice Biennale – the only French woman to have had this "privilege" between 1970 and 1982. However, this moment of "glory" left her with a bitter taste: a painting of hers entitled 'Les Couteaux me terrifient' (Knives Terrify Me) was stabbed by a maniac in the exhibition.

In 1983, Monirys exhibited at J. and J. Donguy in Paris. She moved to the 13th arrondissement in Paris, where she would live until her death.

Between 1976 and 1985, several emblematic works by Monirys entered the collections of institutions such as the MAM in Paris, the MAMC in Strasbourg, the Musée de Grenoble and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, as well as major private collections in France and abroad.

In 1986, Sabine Monirys made a radical switch. She painted faces on paper, tore them up and kept only the eyes, then dropped the shreds loose in a storm of paint. The canvas was lacerated, scratched, and crumpled, and sometimes contained debris that became part of the painting. She exhibited these works on paper at Galerie Hérold, Brussels, in 1991.

In the early 1990s, Sabine Monirys turned to sculpture and drawing. She studded her figures with nails and shards of glass (the “âmes barbelées” [barbed souls] series) and filled notebooks with angry drawings.

These drawings form a fresco in which nightmares and sexual visions are counterpointed by gratingly humorous phrases gleaned from the press.

A book on which she collaborated with the writer Nicolas Vatimbella and published in 2001 by Éditions du Seuil brought together some of these drawings under the title 'En vain l’azur'.

Deeply affected by the stroke suffered by her son Antoine Monory in 2003, Sabine Monirys began work on a kind of diary; mixing plants, herbs, and dried flower petals with aphorisms or thoughts written in pencil, she composed tiny notebooks that she called “herbiers” (herbariums).

Over time, Monirys' works become funnier, freer, and, in the end, more peaceful, as if, going beyond her intimate struggles, the artist had achieved the wisdom to which she aspired.

Sabine Monirys died in Paris on 4 March 2016.

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