Univers de Ruines (Universe of Ruins) I Sculpture

Hélène Cohen Solal was born on 23 January 1960 in Paris, France. Between 1987 and 2014, she was an Art teacher in different schools in Paris and started her artistic career. Her works evoke the catastrophe and destruction of both world wars, the Holocaust and more recently about the violences towards women. Her techniques include collage, painting and drawings. She uses “poor materials” such as wallpapers, fishing lures, kitchen paper, shoe polish, wax, candles, oil pastel, and re-use previous pieces of other works, tissue, bits of used paper. These elements, "residues of things" that are becoming the “row materials”, thus "the rest" is at the heart of the work of the artist and each time destroying is the prerequisite to build. Collage allows her to work on composition because the pieces are like puzzle elements. Her work sometimes incorporates photographs, prints and drawings, and various materials. In the 2000's, she developed her interests to work on ceramic and sculptures. She also works producing lithographies and artists' notebooks, still expressing memoory of the Shoah. Hélène Cohen Solal sees the creation as a testimony of thoughts, History, resistance and material development, psychic, reflexive. She gets her inspiration from artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski and Joan Miró. These "residues of things" are then manufactured by the artist, are like births of remains and ruins that make up anachronistic and dystopic universes. She also publishes many articles to support the place of creation in the field of history, philosophy, pedagogy.