Sophie BARTHELEMY was born in Paris in 1969. She graduated from Beaux-Arts in 1993 and began exhibiting in the contemporary art world in the 90s. Director of art-video works, it is thanks to a film devoted to deforestation in Amazonia that her peers acclaim her work (Jury Prize for the work The Forest of the Living at the Festival Vidéo-Art Plastique d'Hérouville Saint-Clair in 1993).
The massacre of Yanomami Indians in Brazil, relayed by the media, coincides with the media coverage of her work, a synchronicity that makes her take another direction because being an artist suddenly seems irrelevant. She then withdrew from the artistic world, for a life of simplicity and degrowth in line with her new awareness. Settled near a forest, she devoted herself to permaculture and welcomed adults with disabilities. But after a few years, she was drawn back to her need to create.
After ten years of withdrawal from any exhibition, she took up the torch to pursue a humanist pictorial work, driven by the same need to "counteract the cynicism of the world".
Familiar with color, which she works extensively by successive layers, scraping and other repentances, she currently devotes herself to an essentially intuitive work, not premeditated. In her creative process, it is a question of play and letting go, of wonder and self-forgetfulness. The Human, the Nature, the Animal and the Invisible are her favorite subjects.
Sophie Barthélémy does not exhibit much. However, she has had several artistic collaborations, notably with the Galerie du Parvi (Paris), the Galerie Eugène (Laval), and the Galerie Carré d'Artiste in Marseille.
