Virginie Loze

Born in 1964 in Toulouse (France), she lives and works there.

Virginie Loze creates an imagery populated by hybrid figures, by strange characters in comical situations, and individuals confronted by the torments of contradictory forces that reveal the fragility of being, its fleeting nature and the violence of the world. Tenderly and with humour, her body of work reminds one of caricatures and underground comic strips, fed by existential angst and images of surrealism. Virginie Loze's stroke alternates between figures and crude lines. The media used are colouring pencils, acrylic paint, felt-tips, dry pastels, graphite. The shapes are made up of lines, solid colour and coloured shading. The bases are large pieces of white paper. Thus, like ectoplasm floating in space, her mutant creatures and anthropomorphic landscapes form rebuses, puzzles. The empty space left underlines these hybrid characters that are confronted by division, mental disturbance or fanciful disfigurements.

These works are like dreams, hallucinations, outlets or keys to personal or collective situations that would not have been perceived without their illustration.

The driving force for Virginie Loze's work is the desire to see her unconsciousness appear through the formal game in which her plastic thought develops. Cartoon artists like Reiser inspired the basis of her work. She ap- preciates the work of Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Uwe Henneken, Jessica Stockholder, Edvard Munch, Salvador Dalí, Raymond Petitbon or Jim Shaw. Having graduated from the isdaT in Toulouse she has presented solo exhibitions at the Officina gallery (Perugia, Italy), at the Villa Formose, the Beaux-Arts school in Pau as well as at the Galerie de la Borde Basse in Castres. She has also taken part in group exhibitions such as Tandem, European Cultural Season France / North Rhine-West- phalia, Draw! At the Galerie du Jour, agnès b. and the 38th Salon de Montrouge. In 2005

her work was presented as part of the Vertiges publication of le Printemps de septembre.