TIMEQUAKES, a series by artist Sabine Pigalle, who works out of Paris, is to be unveiled to the general public in Japan for the first time.
The TIMEQUAKES series expresses the chaos witnessed by the artist during the Japanese earthquake of March 2011. Transposing material destruction into a temporal pileup, Sabine Pigalle mingles painted court portraits from the late 15th, 16th and early 17th century with contemporary photographic portraits, fused with abstract night photos of Tokyo, taken during her time in Japan. She uses the works of masters such as Jan Van Eyck, Raphael, da Vinci, and Clouet, not as inspiration, but as the materials from which she creates new artistic works. By using these pieces, she compresses time, overlapping layer after layer of memory, taking on our artistic heritage anew, and creating new combinations of structure and arrangement. Like collages, these pieces are formed of layers from different eras, creating a curious sense of familiarity. This sense of familiarity gives the pieces a timeless quality.
These composite portraits bridge the two different powerful expressive portrait approaches of painting and photography, while linking portraiture with abstract art, and classical art with modern art.
