CATHERINE GARRIGUE

b. 1954, France

WORKS   |   BIOGRAPHY   |   EXHIBITIONS

SELECTED WORKS

BIOGRAPHY

Since childhood, Catherine Garrigue had a passion for art. She studied art history at the Centre Tolbiac of the University of Paris and trained as a sculptor in the studio of Marcel Mahu.
After years of working in the educational sector, she opened her own studio in 1996, offering modeling courses. Due to an intense period of emotional tension, in 2011 she decided to give that up as well and turn to drawing.

In the evenings Catherine Garrigue would draw on tiny scraps of paper with a simple ballpoint pen whatever happened to come to mind. There were no references or aesthetic goals that interfered. Drawing became her diary, her own pictorial way of writing. The act of drawing merged with the urgency to regain a meaning in life and a psychological balance.

In these evening drawing sessions, in silence and solitude, she entered a state of complete absorption, abandoning herself to an automatic process. In this way, without her conscious intervention, fantastic flowers, faces, figures, insects emerged from a dense mesh of unleashed lines. Abstraction and figuration were no longer opposites. Catherine Garrigue simply let everything come into being.
She herself says about this artistic process that became an obsession for her: "As a loner, I approach the subject with the utmost concentration. Time loses its meaning, even its sense. An inner force seems to guide my hand. The images I need to complete the subject emerge without my knowledge. I thus become a simple mediator between thinking and creating. Numerous drawings were created, each of which is the echo of the other. An invisible line connects the themes in the form of scores in which each note would echo in inner tension. Each stroke becomes a letter, each drawing a text."

The works she has since created on large sheets of paper have a mythical quality. In them, a deeply personal mythology combines with transpersonal spaces of experience. They lead and seduce into a space of mystical twilight, to where the numinous substrate of existence designs an archetypal pictorial cosmos.

One of Catherine Garrigue’s drawings, now part or CoMA, won the “Dreams & Visions Art Competition 2022” of the College of Psychic Studies in London. The College also published an insightful interview with the artist.

SELECTED EXHBITIONS

2022 Creative Spirits, The College of Psychic Studies, London, England 11 Oct - 10 Dec 2022