Aurélie de Heinzelin is a French artist, specialized in drawing, engraving and painting. She holds a master's degree in modern literature from the University of Rouen and since 2009 she has been awarded the national higher diploma in plastic expression after her studies at HEAR Strasbourg. Her works have since met with the public in numerous events and venues including the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, the Bernard Jordan Gallery in Paris and Luxembourg Art Week, etc.
During her artistic career, Aurélie de Heinzelin has been hosted by several institutions such as the French Center in Berlin (2017), the Ministry of Culture in Luxembourg (2016) and the French Institute in Stuttgart (2010). She is preparing for 2021 a personal exhibition, Degré Est, at the Frac Lorraine in Metz.
As a painter, she constantly reflects on the soul and the philosophical aspect of her creations:
"I am a painter. To be a painter for me is to react to the world, to digest it and to invent it. I see my work as a carnival, a place where everything is possible. A place where nature and culture, savagery and education, mix, where natural instincts freed from all morality express themselves freely. In my paintings there is always a tension between the everyday and the phantasmagorical. My friends are my models, but I don't hesitate to take them elsewhere, far from themselves, into the world of my fantasies.
In my paintings, I live an 'other' life. If I am well brought up in real life, I am an 'unpolished', 'unpolished' painter. My spiritual father is Otto Dix. My spiritual mother, Paula Rego.
Painting, for me, is being able to be both a good sister and a pimp mother without any problem. It is to create hybrid beings, a man with breasts, a woman with 3 legs. It is to make my friend Célie and Pantagruel, the character of Rabelais painted by Doré, cohabit in the same space-time. It is to make a world where midgets and giants meet. A world that does not know the earth's gravity. It's having a blue face. It is to see a statue bleed. It's trampling on a former lover and getting out without a scratch. It is to climb with bare hands an impassable mountain without being a mountaineer. It's cutting off a head and walking around with it at arm's length without risking prison."
- Aurélie de Heinzelin