Hanna DUBEY

As with every legendary artist—or one destined to become one—an existential defining moment lies at the heart of Hanna Dubey’s (born in 2001 in Paris) work and style: her visit to the Marfa Desert in the United States, where weather phenomena, nuclear experiments, the menacing sky, and its radioactive lights evoked in her a feeling bordering on the sublime—somewhere between wonder and terror.

Beyond these mesmerizing landscapes, his paintings are also the result of an iconographic process drawing on a wide range of sources, ranging from the Renaissance to his everyday experiences. These images, resurfacing on the canvas after a long period of sedimentation in his mind, resemble in their effect the philosophical concept of the afterlife of images (Nachleben). Her technique itself contributes to this aesthetic, as Hanna Dubey first paints the luminous layers and also taking care to prepare her canvases herself, thereby imbuing them with a sense of history. The result is visual fragments of isolated, silent elements that seem to radiateby an overheated material that threatens to render them illegible and cause them to vanish.

Thus, the visual impact and evocative power of his work are rooted in a synergistic approach in which the creative process, representation, and technique give rise to these unforgettable images, somewhere between an enigmatic collective memory and the depiction of a world that is both in decline and on the verge of blossoming, in the style of Anselm Kiefer.