Agnès Dubart

Agnès Dubart is a young French artist, born in Lille in 1985.

She graduated in 2006 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes and continued her training at Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Later, Agnes Dubart obtained her masters degree and specialized in engraving in 2010 and was awarded the Prix Horlait-Dapsens the same year.

Her carnival like universe is influenced by great masters. In her engravings, one can notice the violence of Goya, Bosh's fantasy and Brueghel's dances.

Engraving is an art, and isn't much represented in painting or photography, but Agnes Dubart is actually quite proud to highlight this aspect and represent it. She uses techniques like wood engraving, etchings or even aquatints in her graphic research.

Her work is the result of theoretical and philosophical reflections where she questions the body in movement, which turns upside down and loses balance. In this unstable context, the engraving is the perfect receptor of these agitated characters. She literally retains the trace of her creation, the image asserts itself through strength. It's through the ardors of digging, scratching, damaging or skidding that the artist is able to guide her gestures. The background takes form as well.

The artist also questions the metamorphosis of the body, a detailed metamorphosis until the mutation. The engravings become alive under tiny hybrid and eccentric creatures, who undergo the hazards of deformed bodies. Dark but joyful and funnily touching, one sees them as marginal, a little lost in their universe and nothing like the medieval codes with grotesque appearances.

Agnes Dubart's work is widely presented and acknowledged today. She was one of the artists who was present at the biennials de Gravure Contemporaine in Louvière and Liège. In 2013, she was awarded the prix Gravix and prix Pierre Cardin in 2014.