Boisecq Simone | pgallerysculpture

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Simone Boisecq (1922-2012) was born in Algiers, where she followed a course in design and sculpture before studying philosophy and aesthetics at university. She completed her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she settled after 1945. Initially she worked as a journalist, but after she met, and eventually married, the sculptor Karl-Jean Longuet she changed course and became a sculptor. The couple would work for thirty years under eachother's gaze and develop in parallel, but they kept different ateliers and never worked together. Boisecq forged her own path from the outset when she made her first ceramics. Her early work bears witness to her youth in Algiers with allusions to tribal culture and the vegetal world. Boisecq was also influenced by her deeply religious father, a poet from Britanny, and her work contains elements of Breton and Celtic culture. Boisecq created a mythology all her own, where seemingly unrelated symbols were combined to create a deeply personal idiom. For instance, her 'tree' sculptures refer to the vegetal world, but also to the cross and totems.

Boisecq had her first solo exhibition in 1952, followed by many more in the years to come. She struck up friendships with the great artists of her time, such as Picasso, Brancussi and Zadkine, while Germaine Richer praised her work as early as 1954. She exhibited with other sculptors such as Etienne-Martin, Gilioli, Alicia Penalba, Stahly and Isabelle Waldberg. She also participated in various art fairs, namely the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, the Salon de la Jeune sculpture, the Salon de Mai, the Biennale de Parisand salon Saga.

From the mid fifties, Boisecq started to work in cement and bronze. An important work of this time was 'The Faun', which refers to mythology and duality. New themes entered her work, such as the city and the sun, recurrent themes in the years to come. Between 1956 and 1986 Simone Boisecq created a dozen monumental sculptures on commission. In 1984 she started a series of drawings in ink.

Between 1999 and 2001 retrospective exhibitions of her work took place in France , Germany and Portugal. A traveling exhibition of the artwork of Simone Boisecq and Karl-Jean Longuet ensued between 2011 et 2013 in the Museum of Fine Arts in Reims, Agen, and Limoges, the Museum Sainte-Croix in Poitiers and the museum Unterlinden in Colmar. Boisecq's work is included in many private and public collections, among them the Centre de Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the museum Unterlinden.

Simone Boisecq passed away in 2012.