Harley Quinn

" I draw women with a poisonous and unapologetic femininity. I like women who are strong-willed and self-aware, who are free to play with their sensuality. I believe that all women are the heroines of their own lives: choosing to be whoever they want to be, with their bodies, their image and their identity, without fear of judgment. That is what empowerment means to me.

I am a French visual artist whose work explores representations of femininity, particularly in urban spaces. I live and work in the Paris suburbs.

I appropriate images from Pop Culture and combine them with a minimalist artistic technique: a white line on a black background. My work explores different representations of femininity.

I began drawing at the age of sixteen, drawing female bodies in a studio. From that point on, my fascination with the female body never left me.

I first worked as a nude model for photographers, artists and sculptors. During this time, obsessive questions began to emerge, particularly around the constant tension between flesh and the mind. My artistic practice and its visual expression are a natural continuation of these questions.

I try to convey the complexity of the mind through a certain graphic sobriety. I draw in white on black.

My work explores representations of femininity in popular culture: magazines, manga, comics, pulp novels, video games, movie posters… These are the images that have shaped the construction of the female image in both public and private spaces since the 1950s.

By disrupting their traditional composition and adding a white bar to their titles, I emphasize the distance between the memories they evoke and the viewer. In this way, I encourage reflection on the role of the media in shaping the collective unconscious and representations of femininity.

Starting from an image that can sometimes be vulgar, I remove the eyes and skin tones, keeping only lines and negative silhouettes of bodies.

Through an aesthetic approach based on apparent simplicity and a logic rooted in Street Art, I bring these idealized bodies back into the urban space, displaying them in the streets where they originally came to life. "

Nina Van Kidow