Hélène Delprat

The versatile practice of French artist Hélène Delprat has centered on the human condition, delving into themes of life and death across various mediums. Her extensive body of work spans painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video, theater, interview projects, and installations.

Biography of Hélène Delprat

Hélène Delprat was born in 1957 in France. She completed her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. From 1982 to 1984, she was a resident at the esteemed Villa Medici in Rome.

Upon returning to Paris, Delprat showcased her works with Galerie Maeght for a decade starting from 1985. During this period, she gained recognition for her totemic, primitive style of figuration. In 1995, she ceased gallery representation.

Since 2014, she has been instructing drawing at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and has served as the head of the studio since October 2019 (Les Explorateurs/Les Inventeurs). 

Delprat's notable solo exhibitions include "Monster Soup" at Hauser & Wirth (2024), "Le Souvenir des Batailles Perdues" at Museu Picasso (2023), "I HATE MY PAINTINGS [Je déteste mes peintures]" at Galerie Christophe Gaillard (2020), "To sleep, to die no more" at Galerie Carlier Gebauer (2018), and many more.

The artist has also participated in group exhibitions held at various prestigious venues worldwide, including MAM - Musée Art Moderne de Paris, Musée-FRAC OCCITANIE, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Galerie C3, Galerie Gisèle Linder, Galerie Spark, among others.

Currently, Hélène Delprat resides in Paris.

Hélène Delprat's Art Style

Navigating between fiction and documentary, humor and melancholy, Delprat's works form a vast constellation of references drawn from literature, film, radio, philosophy, internet databases, recorded national histories, and canonical art history. Often compared to an iconologist, she distills diverse sources of inspiration into a remarkable inventory—a world simultaneously accidental and purposeful, beautiful and grotesque. Through themes of memory, identity, recording, and legacy, her art serves as a poignant reminder that the past is a construct and the present is transient.

In the early 2000s, she identified herself as an 'ex-French painter', while focusing on creating small gouaches. Later, Delprat dedicated herself to video, theater, installations, and radio creations. Drawing from literary, filmic, and documentary sources, she explored non-painterly mediums, allowing her extensive research to manifest in a variety of forms.

Delprat's deep research and explorations into the unknown ultimately influenced her return to painting in the late 2000s. Her artistic output continues to be driven by her boundless curiosity and her habit of collecting information from both the past and her surroundings. Delprat's multi-layered paintings create a space where fiction and documentary intermingle, set within an anachronistic framework. Her enigmatic characters and objects defy context, resisting a singular, organized narrative.