birobent

Martine BIROBENT (Montreal, Canada) Born in 1955 in southern France, Martine Birobent has since moved to the Canadian and Montreal bohemian district of Plateau Mont-Royal, where she works in a mosaic covered studio in an alleyway. She has mainly been active in Montreal, participating in many solo and group exhibitions, working live on TV or building an art-car. She paints, sculpts resin constructions on recycled materials structures, she also does textile and knitted works. Birobent is extremely difficult to corner. She is part of a new non-academic generation of outsiders, sometimes attracted by pop surrealism. She has a very strong signature, one of a women artist in her fifties, having worked in poor surroundings elementary schools a large part of her life, and reacting to our world in a very unique bitter-sweet way. She is now involved full time in art, installation and performances and has turned herself to the Web and international art fairs to gain more attention. Her current body of work, the Muzzled Dolls, is a compulsive dive into crochet knitting, improvising infinite variations on the theme of mouth shut women and kids. Her paintings are usually grouped into series driven by feminists or autobiographical themes : Elle, would look into the dynamics of the couple and L'enfant volant by kids leaving home. More recently Mutants et Cambriens, loosely inspired by the findings of Stephen Jay Gould and Stephen W. Hawking, had explored body mutation into some sort of radical hermaphrodite, while Cadeaux bleus was inspired by menaupause and medical interrogations. For those series she has used multiple techniques, creating paintings, sculptures and mixed medium pieces using recycled junk and toxic fiberglass, but also pure pigments imported in a private way. You will understand that Birobent is not formally trained academic. She will use ephemeral approaches only in support of physical, durable pieces. She is also far from the esthetics of popular commercial galleries. Her strength lies in being anchored in the human condition and producing disturbingly charged works. For information, please contact Youyou stratégies culturelles : mailto:birobine@youyou.ca Personnal website http://birobent.com Artlog http://birobent.artlog.com/ Twitter http://twitter.com/birobent Facebook http://www.facebook.com/people/Martine-Birobent/702585689 Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/birobent/ MySpace http://www.myspace.com/birobine