Home / Artists / Karine ROUGIER
Back

Karine ROUGIER

The drawings of Karine Rougier depict a curious, disturbing, sexual, and sometimes macabre population. Evanescent and lost on the canvas, the characters discreetly pursue their anxiety-provoking and liberated activities. Karine Rougier's world encompasses everything from medical imagery and shamanism to Indian gods, Batman, and Hieronymus Bosch.

Her work is inspired by her travels, her underwater explorations in the Mediterranean, and her desire to believe in the marvelous. Having grown up in Ivory Coast, she was very quickly fascinated by magical rituals, the bewitchment of bodies, and wild animals.

Delving into the material, the artist plays with textures, layers, and dilutions, creating abstract backgrounds where reality and dream, fauna and flora, stars and stones levitate, suspended in the heart of time. The black line draws every hair, every coat, every detail with a precision that undoubtedly stems from a certain form of obsession. A fragility emanates from her work, but it also exudes a magical force, a mysterious energy that re-enchants reality.

The Surrealists were the first to incorporate mechanisms from so-called 'outsider art' into their official practice: representation of characters, landscapes inspired by popular tales and traditions, simple techniques (drawing, painting), humble or found materials, as well as automatic writing opening the door to an unconscious increasingly denied by positivist rationalism. Over the years, Karine Rougier has created an expressionistic formal vocabulary that gives pride of place to eroticism, dreams, childhood, and the monstrous.

Web storeKarine ROUGIER

Biography

Karine Rougier was born in Malta in 1982. She lives and works in Marseille.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

  • 2005 / DNSEP, Aix-en-Provence School of Art

SOLO EXHIBITIONS – SELECTION

  • 2019 / Chapelle de la Visitation, Thonon les Bains
  • 2019 / At the same time she felt the matter of the sky, Thalie Foundation, Brussels, Belgium
  • 2019 / Around us, Studio Fotokino, Marseille
  • 2014 / YIA, Carreau du temple, Paris
  • 2013 / Visit of the forms, Winner of the Art Collector Project, Patio Opéra, Paris
  • 2013 / The Distant Lands, House of the Book of Image and Sound, Villeurbanne
  • 2012 / A motionless bird in the sky, Fondation Vacances Bleues, Marseille

GROUP EXHIBITIONS – SELECTION

  • 2022 / Private Choice, Lines of life / Life lines, Paris
  • 2021 / Private Choice, Odyssey / Odyssey, Paris
  • 2020 / Even the rocks reach out to kiss you, Transpalette, centre d’art contemporain à Bourges
  • 2018-2019 / Quel amour?!, curated by Eric Corne, Berardo Museum, Lisbon, Portugal
  • 2018 / Quel amour?!,, curated by Eric Corne, Museum of Contemporary Art, Marseille
  • 2018 / Loup y es-tu, chateau Maison Lafitte, curated by Amélie Adamo
  • 2018 / The Snake Show, curated by Bettina Hutschek, Valetta, Malta
  • 2017 / An un-quiet world, Abbaye St André, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Meymac
  • 2017 / Homo Melitensis: An incomplete inventory in 19 chapters, Maltese Pavilion, Venice Biennale, curated by Bettina Hutschek and Raphael Vella, Venice
  • 2017 / Peindre, dit-elle, chap 2, curated by Julie Crenn, Amélie Lavin and Annabelle Ténèze, Musée des Beaux Arts de Dole
  • 2016 / 5×2, Patio Opéra, curated by Philippe Piguet and Art collector, Paris
  • 2016 / The space of drawing, Estrine Museum, Saint Rémy de Provence
  • 2015 / Where the wild things live, with Charles Fréger and Muriel Moreau, Fotokino, Marseille
  • 2015 / Art Brussels, Brussels
  • 2015 / Drawing Now! Contemporary Drawing Fair, Paris
  • 2012 / Collages, Museum of Concrete Art, Mouans-Sartoux
  • 2012 / Drawing Now! Contemporary Drawing Fair » Paris
  • 2011 / Art on Paper, White Hotel, Brussels.
  • 2011 / Drawing Now! Contemporary Drawing Fair, Paris
  • 2010 / Contemporary Drawing Fair, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris
  • 2010 / Return from Skopje, Chateau de Servières, Marseille
  • 2009 / Slick 09, Contemporary Art Fair, at 104, Paris
  • 2009 / Biennial of Young Creators from Europe and the Mediterranean, Carré Saint Anne, Montpellier
  • 2009 / Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia
  • 2009 / Contemporary Drawing Fair, Paris

AWARDS & RESIDENCIES

  • 2022 / Drawing Now Prize
  • 2013 / Winner of the Art Collector Prize
  • 2010 / Winner of Mécènes du Sud, grant for the publishing and production of works
  • 2008 / Residency at l’âge d’Or, Berlin Münzstrasse
Artists