Hélène Delprat (b. 1957 in Amiens) lives and works
in Paris. She won a scholarship that enabled her
to spend the years 1982 to 1984 at the Villa Medici
in Rome. Over the past four decades, Delprat the
painter, video artist, set designer and blogger has
developed a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary body
of work. She is represented by both the Galerie
Christophe Gaillard and, since 2023, by Hauser &
Wirth, whose Paris gallery staged a solo exhibition
of her works in early 2024.
Blast 3 belongs to a series of three works of 2019
that are typical of Delprat’s distinctive and painterly
approach to art. The chaotic complexity of her
paintings reflects the kind of layerings that are an
essential aspect of several different artistic genres
as well as many of her sources of inspiration,
including comics, newspaper illustrations, feature
f
ilms, Abstract Expressionism, English literature
and Renaissance art – to name but a few. Blast 3
shows sketchy figures emerging from multiple
layers of splintered splashes of paint, organic
shapes, grids and lines, as if surfacing unbidden
from the obscure depths of memory. Delprat is
fascinated by paradoxes and contrasts and creates
works in which the comical runs up against the
repulsive and the figurative against the abstract.
Her imaginary universe is adorned with pigments
and gold sequins – and populated by fantastically
deformed monsters.
Pigments and acrylic on canvas
100 × 80 cm
Signed and dated on the reverse H. Delprat 2019
Copyright: Hélène Delprat
Provenance: donated by Marie-Puck Broodthaers