*1975 Los Angeles – lives in Holland

Nicole Bianchet operates within various artistic fields. It is evident that Bianchet’s boundless passion for language, music, singing, photography, installations, and of course painting could never be separated. One aspect lives through the other because everything originates in emotions, experiences, and imagination due to mutual fertilisation. Her paintings illustrate the creative process, as they clearly show the signs of a fight for that which we have to face at the end. Bianchet chooses large plywood panels as the medium for her imagery, which she not only paints, but also carves, putting great effort into the process. Layers of paint, one part informally varnished in play with the texture of the wood, the other part strongly covering, then again showing slight to deep damage of the surface through carving, scratching, and peeling with the knife, the wood rarely exposed or healing the wounds with colour. Bianchet uses the knife cuts to release abstract reason, creating irregular structures, lines, and natural forms.

However, it is never about the pure depiction of nature. The artist contrasts realistic reproduction with the absurd and the fantastic: with partially glowing, artificial colours, false spaces and perspectives, fictional plants and trees. Reality becomes illusion and illusion becomes reality. In her smaller works, which resemble large shards or fragments of wall plaster, the artist charms us with her alter ego as a femme fatale – seductive yet vulnerable, melancholic, even longing on the cracked cardboard or paper. Bianchet studied painting under Karin Sander and Gustav Kluge from 1995 to 2002 at the renown Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. As a masterclass student of Kluge, himself a painter through and through, she nevertheless felt the impulse not to draw clear distinctions between the arts. At the same time, she trained in classical singing, leading her to release multiple albums to this today.