Elusive Paradise

Introduction

ABOUT THE WORK

Distorted Nature

It is immediately apparent that Isabelle Menin’s artistic background is in painting. Her bright colours and invigorating, fanciful manipulation of texture and materiality have enthralled the art community. Menin’s works are like vortexes, pulling viewers in deeper and deeper.

Menin describes her compositions as “Inland photographs and disordered landscapes”, as a means of drawing parallels between the complexity of the human character and that of nature. The inspiration for her work is drawn in part from Peter Paul Rubens and the so-called “Flemish Primitives”, an artistic circle prominent in the 15th and 16th Centuries that included Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and Rogier van der Weyden. Menin’s link to the Flemish masters can be seen in her endeavour to create a distinctive form of reality inside fictional worlds.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1961, Isabelle Menin currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. After graduating from the Graphic Research School (ERG) in Brussels, in 1999, she explored painting for around 10 years, while working both graphic design and illustration jobs for various clients. Nature has always been a recurring theme for the artist, particularly flora, as aforementioned, starting with her interest in painting. After exhibiting some of these paintings in Belgium during the 1990s, Isabelle Menin decided to abandon the paintbrush and turned her interest photoshop and digital photography, in the late 90s. Still pursuing her interest in flowers, just on a new digital path, she begun a journey of experimentation. She started viscerally taking pictures of the flora that surrounded her and scanning these pictures. She doesn’t photograph a complete arrangement, but rather individual flowers. Which means each single anemone and each orchid is brought in front of the camera, perfectly illuminated and captured with technical expertise. She built up her vast digital collection with these individual shots, piece by piece. Once they are transcribed into a digital palette, she juxtaposes the individual flowers over each other creating complex, multi-layered collages. Some flowers might be moved to the background to create more spatial depth, others she might pile over one another to form delicate mountains. Her incredibly elaborate, ephemeral compositions of flora seem to belong in a world of dreams rather than reality. This is still the way she works today, however, with an entire ocean of flowers to choose from and with better technical and digital skills to apply to her creations. Often her final works are large enough to crash a computer’s processing power. She continues to experiment with digital textures and colors, transforming them, mixing them, and giving shape to their fictional nature, which retains both a dense and flamboyant feel at the same time. Isabelle Menin continues to exhibit across the world and her work is now recognized around the world, through an ever stronger loyal collector base.

Bio

1961	Born in Brussels, Belgium
	Studied Art at the School of Graphic Research in Brussels
	Lives and works in Brussels

Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

2017	Garden on Orchard, Muriel Guépin Gallery, New York, USA
2017	Seattle Art Fair, Muriel Guépin Gallery, New York, USA
2017	Gothic Show, Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, USA
2016	Karen Margolis and Isabelle Menin, Muriel Guépin Gallery, New York, USA
2016	Round it up!, Muriel Guépin Gallery, New York, USA
2016	Art Market San Francisco, San Francisco, USA
2016	Total Flora, Galerie Christine Knauber, Berlin, Germany

Group Exhibitions

2016	Belgium Modern Art Exhibition, Hongqiao Museum, Shanghai, China
2016	OFF Art Fair, Brussels, Belgium
2016	Kunstraï, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2016	MIA Fair, Milano, Italy
2016	Setup Contemporary Art Fair, Bologna, Italy
2016	Fotofever - Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France
2016	The Perception of Beauty - Group show, Sophie Marée Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands
2016	Femmes de Belgique - Group Show, Sophie Marée Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands
2016	FLORA, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Mons, Belgium
2013	The Perception of Beauty, Sophie Marée Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands
2013	Les Femmes de Belgique, Sophie Marée Gallery, The Hague, Netherlands
2011	Belgium Modern Art Exhibition, Hongqiao Museum, Shanghai, China
2010	250/3, Galerie Antonio Nardone, Brussels, Belgium
1999	FLORA, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Mons, Belgium