‘I would like to return to the simplicity of a child who uses their intuitive knowledge, a vocabulary of signs, drawn from their unconscious to create.’ - Véronique Wirbel
Véronique Wirbel was born in 1950 in France, one of twelve children. Her father served in the colonial infantry, and her early years were spent moving between West Africa, Central Africa, and later Latin America. What she encountered there stayed with her in a very direct way, not as distant references but as lived material: animals, ritual forms, ornaments, ways of structuring space and meaning that would later reappear in her work.
She settled in Paris in the early 1970s and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Jacques Yankel’s studio. At that time, she was already finding her influences. Frida Kahlo and Aloïse Corbaz were important, as were African ritual objects, pre-Columbian imagery, and the broader field of Art Brut. Corneille also occupies a particular place, both in terms of art and on a personal level.
Around the end of the 1970s, her painting takes on a different weight. The earlier, more open compositions give way to tightly worked surfaces built through repetition and layering. Figures, signs, fragments of words, and drawn elements accumulate until the image holds together as a dense field rather than a scene. She combines ink, paint, collage, and writing in a way that resists hierarchy. Color is often frontal, sometimes almost raw, and the forms are reduced to what is necessary for them to remain legible within the saturation.
From the mid-1980s, the space contracts further. The compositions become more compact, structured around hybrid figures, animals, and totemic presences. This is where her vocabulary stabilizes. It draws at once on personal memory and on systems that feel older than the individual, mythological, ritual, almost archetypal. Writing becomes integral to the surface. She would sometimes note down words or sentences heard on the radio while working, allowing them to enter the painting as fragments, not as commentary but as part of its internal rhythm.
Her ties with Latin American artists in Paris were important, and reinforced during her stays in Mexico. She paid close attention to painters who had constructed their own symbolic languages, particularly those connected to Oaxaca, such as Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, as well as Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and Joaquín Torres-García. What mattered to her there was the possibility of holding together transformation, compression, and symbolic charge within a single image.
In September 1990, in Étretat, Véronique Wirbel died at the age of thirty-nine, during a period of personal difficulty. The work she left, though produced over a short span of time, forms a remarkably consistent body, with its own internal logic, its recurring figures, and a way of building images that remains immediately recognizable.