Barbara Asei Dantoni

Barbara Asei Dantoni, is a Franco-Italian-Cameroonian artist and designer based in Pau.
She works between France and Cameroon.

From the age of 10, she trained in academic drawing, painting and modeling at the school of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau, for 8 years. Then she joined the Strate Design School in Paris from which she graduated in design with congratulations from the Jury. His work was recently exhibited at AKAA Art Fair in 2022, then widely noticed at the Salon D Dessin in Paris in 2023.

His experience in design includes the design offices of large furniture companies, agencies in the luxury industry and architecture. She created her creative studio with the desire to open bridges between different worlds. Her first projects were scenographies in the field of live performance: theater, operas, aquatic shows, etc. In 2009, she created the fashion brand Marthe Aimé. His collections show at Toronto and London Fashion Week.

In 2015 Barbara Asei Dantoni won the Jacquart Design Trophy, an international design prize launched by Paris Design Week. Between 2017 and 2019, the artist created the Blue Landscape, a textile work of more than 7 meters, in collaboration with the Tissage Moutet factory (Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant). In August 2019, the Élysée Palace chose to exhibit the Blue Landscape at the heart of the G7 Summit in Biarritz, to welcome the Heads of State present.

Barbara Asei Dantoni develops an introspective language to question her roots and talk about her ancestors as well as her femininity in the form of a set of archaeological and genealogical studies. Her works, or “Imaginary Identities" as she titles them, in relief resembling African masks, are the fruit of her quest for identity and invite us to question the notions of encounters, crossbreeding, intermingling. combining drawings, paper cutouts, collages and textiles, his work is anchored in a context of immersive and total art which questions our humanities and which always tends to broaden horizons.