Valérie Depadova

Born in 1965 in Algeria, Valérie Depadova started painting and sculpting from an early age. Her pictorial work, distinguished by ethnic connotations, was inspired by the objects her father used to bring her back from his military missions in the heart of Africa. Depadova mixes acrylic, pastel, ink, pencil and collage of magazines and old encyclopaedias. They are reworked, reprinted, wrinkled, painted and assembled in a patchwork of colours. Her characters, created on an abstract background, slowly come to life. Africa plays a major key of inspiration in Depadova’s art through the stylized human forms, their disproportions, the bulging or curved lines, and the characters’ often asymmetrical and dynamic postures.