Artist: Véronique Wirbel

Nagas presents an exhibition dedicated to the work of Véronique Wirbel (1950–1990).

Born into a family of twelve children, Wirbel spent her childhood in West and Central Africa, where her father served in the French colonial infantry, and later travelled for periods in Latin America. These early displacements and encounters with unfamiliar landscapes, rituals, and traditions would shape her artistic vocabulary.

After settling in Paris, she studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Jacques Yankel. Wirbel cited the Surrealist Frida Kahlo and the outsider artist Aloïse Corbaz among her major influences, alongside African ritual arts, pre-Columbian imagery, and Art Brut. She also maintained a close relationship with the painter Corneille, who supported her work.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wirbel developed the distinctive method that would define her practice: dense pictorial fields built through the accumulation of figures, signs, fragments of text, and symbolic forms. Working on both paper and canvas, she combined drawing, writing, collage, and mixed media to construct compositions populated by animals, hybrid figures, and totemic structures.

Wirbel also formed connections with Latin American artists in Paris and during her stays in Mexico, where she encountered the work of painters such as Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, as well as Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and Joaquín Torres-García. Their approaches to symbolism and metamorphosis resonated with her own search for a personal visual language.

Véronique Wirbel died in Étretat in 1990 at the age of thirty-nine. Despite the brevity of her career, she produced a singular body of work defined by its anthropological imagination, vivid color, and complex mythology.