Isabelle Crevier

Isabelle Crevier was born in Paris on the 20th September 1957 to a Canadian mother and French father. At the age of two, she left France and criss-crossed Africa following her father’s different postings in his work as an engineer. The voyage lasted thirteen years, interspersed with several stays in France, where she first took up and tried the paintbrushes of her grandmother, an amateur painter, living in Provence.

As an adolescent and then as an adult she travelled through Egypt, Morocco, India, Burma, Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia. Emotions woven up in the same thread and on the same canvas, memories enriched, giving a new outline to these different worlds. The same joy of life, the same notion of time, which is infinite since it is divine, the same sensation of an uninterrupted chain of life. Isabelle’s paintings reflect her desire to portray all of these adaptations and all of these variations in scope in an appropriate language.

While her academic training has allowed Isabelle Crevier to explore all sort of pictorial techniques, her first encounter with Nicolas de Steal’s work was a determining moment in her life. The 1950’s paintings of the Russian artist had a major impact on her. The oil paint, the knife work, the materials and the colours literally cast a spell on her. It was at that moment that she understood that she wanted to become a painter, and definitively took up the palette knife in ordre to bring out the colours of oil paint in a vibrant manner.

Her degree in interior design, which she obtained in 1981 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, led to a spell working for the French Department of Museums, where she was responsible for designing the lay out of exhibitions, designing furniture and restructuring museum rooms. This chapter in her life, which lasted 10 years, did not in any way make her lose sight of her passion for painting, quite the contrary. She profited from her freedom of expression to venture into various pictorial languages and directions. She moved from one pole to another, from drawing to painting, trying out all manners of techniques, all types of instruments, going through the basics on a daily basis, and taking directions that she did not know even existed.

In 1990, at the age of 33, she returned exclusively to painting. Her work became more organized, and her exhibitions in both France and abroad became more and more numerous, not just in galleries and salons, but also in more unusual places such as corporate headquarters, clubs and restaurants. Since 1998, the Arsinoé Gallery in the CNIT building in La Défense near Paris has presented a permanent exhibitions of her new work, then in Paris, Palais des Congrès, since 2006.