Emmanuelle Pellet - La femme bison

Emmanuelle Pellet - The Buffalo Woman
Acrylic painting - Original signed - 2016
Height: 36.2 cm; Width: 28.8 cm

About the work:
In a sky of milky clouds, a young girl with immense eyes floats, suspended between earth and azure. Her long black hair curls into spirals, as if animated by an invisible wind, while a shaggy fur coat — half-bison, half-wild ornament — envelops her body. Down below, a child with blond curls kneels beside a young bison, in a green meadow dotted with slender stalks. The scene suspends time between dream and fable.

Heiress of the Pop Surrealism movement and the Big Eyes aesthetic, the artist builds here an allegory of metamorphosis and the link between childhood and the totem animal. The verticality of the composition — the ascent of the feminine figure above the earthly pair — establishes a soft tension between the dreamlike elevation and the pastoral grounding. The hypnotic gaze, signature of the style, invites the viewer to a contemplation almost childlike, tinged with melancholy and wonder.

The meticulous rendering (textured fur, arabesque strands, detailed foliage) testifies to an exacting painting technique, where every element — from the animal hoof brushing the void to the boy’s curls — participates in the work’s silent narrative.

About the artist:
Historian by training, Emmanuelle Pellet studied at the École du Louvre and then at the Sorbonne before passing the Agrégation of Visual Arts (3rd rank). After several years of teaching, she joined the Louvre Museum as head of Educational Action.
Her works have been shown in galleries in Paris, London, Singapore and Mauritius. They have been the subject of numerous publications and are now part of private collections in Europe, North America, Asia and the Indian Ocean.