Sabine Monirys was born in Oran on 10 December 1936 and died in Paris on 4 March 2016.
In the early 1960s, ‘Sabine’ (as she signed her works at the time) produced naive paintings in which a little girl gets lost in scenery distorted by dreams.
She met the Chinese painter San-yu, but also Jan Voss, Cheval-Bertrand, Lourdes Castro, Roland Topor and Guy de Cointet, whom she had known since adolescence.
Married to Jacques Monory, with whom she had a son, Sabine became friends with the photographer Robert Frank, who had just published The Americans. Despite the ups and downs of their respective lives, Robert Frank and Sabine continued to write to each other and enjoyed a friendship that lasted almost half a century.
In 1967, Sabine met Jérôme Savary and his Grand Magic Circus: they fell madly in love. Pregnant with her second son, she became the heroine of the photo-novel ‘Letizia’ that Savary imagined for the magazine Ali Baba, published in Milan.
She worked on the Grand Magic Circus, illustrated a children's book with Jacques Prévert and another with Roland Topor...
In her studio on rue Santos-Dumont, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where she moved with her sons Antoine and Robinson in 1974, Sabine began to produce large-scale paintings, which she now signed ‘Sabine Monirys’. Her painting asserted itself, the tragic rubbing shoulders with a tender irony.
Her literary passions (Handke, Woolf, Bernhard, Walser...) come to the fore in her singular choice of titles or phrases, which she collects in notebooks and affixes to her works.
She had her first solo exhibition at Fred Lanzenberg's in Brussels in 1975, followed by two more in Paris: Galerie du Rhinocéros in 1976 and Galerie Krief - Raymond in 1979.
Contributing to various magazines (Daily-Bul & Co, Sorcières, etc.) and taking part in a number of group exhibitions, Sabine Monirys' work has been championed by critics such as Alain Jouffroy, Pierre Gaudibert, Gilbert Lascaut and Olivier Kaeppelin, as well as the leading voice of Le Matin de Paris, Maïten Bouisset.
In 1977, Sabine Monirys took part in the Saõ Paulo Biennial. Increasingly masterful, her painting observed the violence of the world, often drawing inspiration from press photos.
In 1980, she exhibited at the Venice Biennale. The only French woman to have had this ‘privilege’ between 1970 and 1982, this moment of ‘glory’ left her with a bitter taste: a painting entitled Les Couteaux me terrifient was stabbed to death by a maniac in one of the exhibition rooms.
In 1983, Sabine Monirys exhibited with J. and J. Donguy in Paris. She moved to the 13th arrondissement in Paris, where she lived until her death.
Between 1976 and 1985, several emblematic works by Sabine Monirys entered the collections of institutions such as the MAM in Paris, the MAMC in Strasbourg, the Musée de Grenoble and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, as well as major private collections in France and abroad.
In 1986, Sabine Monirys made a turning point. She painted faces on paper, tore them up to keep only the eyes, then let these shreds loose in a storm of paint. The canvas is lacerated, scratched and crumpled, and sometimes contains debris that adds to the painting. She exhibited these works on paper at Galerie Hérold in Brussels in 1991.
In the early 1990s, Sabine Monirys turned to sculpture and drawing. She barded figurines with nails and shards of glass (the ‘Les âmes barbelées’ series) and filled notebooks with angry drawings.
These drawings form a fresco in which nightmares and sexual visions are counterpointed by wryly humorous phrases gleaned from the daily press.
A book in which the writer Nicolas Vatimbella collaborated collected some of these drawings under the title En vain l'azur, published in 2001 by Éditions du Seuil.
Marked by the stroke suffered by her son Antoine Monory in 2003, Sabine Monirys turned to a form of diary; mixing plants, herbs and dried flower petals with aphorisms or thoughts written in pencil, she composed tiny notebooks that she called ‘herbiers’.
Over time, the works of Sabine Monirys become funnier, freer and, in the end, more peaceful, as if the artist had reached beyond her intimate struggles to the wisdom to which she aspired.
Public collections :
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Centre National des Arts Plastiques
Fonds d'art contemporain - Paris collections
Museum of Modern Art, Paris
Museum of Annonay
Museum of Grenoble
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg