The Illustrated Man Sculpture

Juliet Vles is an European multidisciplinary artist, born in 1950 in the Netherlands, of Swiss-French nationality and actually living and working in Switzerland. Essentially an abstract painter and sculptor, whose work is mainly to be found in arte povera and minimal art collections, her artistic interests also include installation work, drawing and digital painting. The works of the Krypta series, half-painting half-sculpture, are geometrical constructions overlaid with painting, drawing and written panels incrusted, intarsia-like, into the supporting frame. The word «Krypta» (from Greek «hidden», «secret») stands for an artistic expression that does not seek to depict reality, nor even its abstraction, but the imago of an unconscious area of the mind not immediately accessible to analytical intelligence. Formally, the hallmark of Vles’ artwork is the unusual combination of its sober, geometrical underlying structure and the multilayered, rough texture of the painted surface. Although often shown in exhibitions featuring Concret Art, her work owes more to the Support/Surface movement than to formal Constructivism. In her recent work, the artist increasingly abandons the notion of "making images" and rather sees her wall sculptures as an extension of architecture - expanding the supporting wall by an additional physical and esthetical dimension. In 2017, the artist started working on a series of reverse glass paintings, revisiting the glass sculptures and installations she created between 1997 and 2003 and drawing on the technical experience she acquired during that period. For the GLASSWORKS please see