Catherine Hélie - Vanité 2

Vanity piece (on stretched cardboard) with embroidery, trimmings, antique buttons, and beads. Unique work, signed on the back.

She discovers painting under the auspices of Kandinsky (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979).
She fled school and a philistine family milieu. She settles in the South, living on small “jobs.”
Back in the Île-de-France region, she trains in photography, which leads her to join the Opale image news agency, where her archive of photographs of writers is kept.

She continues this work for a fairly large number of publishing houses (Fayard, etc.), until in 2004 she is offered, first on a full-time basis and then part-time, the sole position of photographer for authors of Éditions Gallimard (where she also photographed the works of painters for catalogs – Cocteau, Dali, Picasso, Pincemin, Pignon-Ernest, etc.), which she leaves in 2016, thus leaving Paris at the same time to settle on the Normandy coast (Seine-Maritime) and devote herself solely to painting (and its derivatives).
This photographer’s work will have durably interrupted her own personal creation activity.

Had already met in 2001 Jacques Clerc (publisher and artist) and Henri Maccheroni (painter and photographer) thanks to whom she exhibited at the Mentoux-Gignac gallery, Paris, 3rd arrondissement, with them once, then alone a second time, before the gallery closed.
She subsequently exhibited in several places, Paris, Nice, Rouen at the Duchoze gallery, and this until the discovery of opportunities offered by online galleries (Artmajeur).

Her modern artists of choice are numerous: Dado, Saura, Staël, Tapiès, Bourgeois, Pollock, Grau-Garriga, Joan Mitchell, Annette Messager, Rebeyrolle, etc.

Her painting work yielded a catalog for the Duchoze gallery, published by the “Rencontres: des lieux, des artistes, Agglomération de Rouen.”

The photographic work on Parisian cemeteries has led to several publications and studies; in the general press (Télérama, etc.) as well as in specialized journals (Ligeia, special issue “La photographie en vecteur,” analyzed by philosopher Jean-Louis Déotte, etc.).

In 2022 she undertook training in classical hand embroidery. She then creates “textile works” as well as weavings using recovered and rummaged materials. She also creates art assemblages, staging recovered objects, the spirituality of plants, bones, etc.

She now dedicates herself entirely to her work.