Amélie Bertrand

Born in 1985, the painter Amélie Bertrand immediately gained recognition on her graduation from the School of Fine Arts in Marseille. By means of her impeccably smooth execution, the artist is able to distance herself from ideal landscapes inspired by nature, and shape decors that fall somewhere between dreams and nightmares.
The planes and surfaces of her works are assembled in a complex and meticulous manner, branching out into skewed perspectives and shallow horizons. All kinds of materials and motifs typical of our era saturate her compositions: OSB, laminates, wire mesh, tiles, fleecing, chains, foliage, camouflage etc. Colors are applied in gradients, yet always as a single layer, as if trapped on the surface of an impenetrable screen. Amélie Bertrand creates an atmosphere of déjà-vu, a contemporary ambience that is both psychological and physical within the confined space of the painting. “I never attempt to create real spaces, only painted ones.” As the missing link between Giotto and West Coast art, Amélie Bertrand combines the great traditions of painting with synthetic psychedelia. She strips back painting with her artificial perspectives and syrupy cocktails of colors, transforming contemporary visual culture into carefully controlled constructs of flat tints.

She has recently enjoyed solo and group exhibitions at the Maison des arts, Malakoff (FR), the Centre d’art contemporain de Meymac (FR), the Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf (DE), the Ecole Municipale des Beaux-Arts, Châteauroux and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole (FR). Her oeuvres are included in the collections of the MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, the CNAP, Paris; the FRAC Limousin, Limoges (FR), Les Abattoirs Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse (FR) and the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne (FR).