French photoartist Sabine Pigalle

French photoartist Sabine Pigalle
Like collages, artworks by Sabine Pigalle reflect the layering of different eras. And her idea – to build a bridge between painting and photography, figurative art and abstraction, classical and contemporary art. Meanwhile, her project “aesthetic installation” combines portraits with works of classical art. In fact, it is the result of philosophical reflection about the man and the artist’s time, which, like our Earth, periodically shaken, but reborn again and again.
Born in 1963 in France, in the city of Rouen, Sabine Pigalle is the famous French photographer and former commercial photographer. At the Sorbonne, she studied literature, but soon felt a craving for the world of fashion and beauty. In the next four years, Sabina worked with the photographer Helmut Newton.

On her way to the paintings and photos she says: “At the moment I have chosen photography as my main means of artistic expression. But at the same time it does not mean that in the future I decide to resort to something else. Perhaps when I turned to photography, it was just what most resonated with my essence, and my experience in life. Photo particularly appeals to me because I can simulate reality, using different lighting or removing models from the context of a specific short-term situation. And If I knew how to draw, I would certainly have tried to express the same thing with a brush.”

“- Someone once told me that I objectify people and humanize objects. Perhaps this is true. Pointless to look at my portraits with some story, fable point of view – for the costumes, jewelry, luxury hats and hairstyles. All the portraits that I used in this project – known works created during the Renaissance, the heyday of humanistic ideas, when it was understood that a person is worthy of respect, he is valuable in himself, and he creates his own destiny. This art is thoroughly anthropocentric, a man in it – the center of the universe”.

French photoartist Sabine Pigalle

“My portraits – a philosophical work, here it is really more a question of the genre as such. I was photographing ordinary people, passers-by – I’m not interested in creating portraits of celebrities. The unknown character allows you to look at the portrait more detached, as if from the outside, like a role-playing game”.

Talking about inspiration, figures that influenced her, Sabine Pigalle points to several sources: “I like mannerism (some of my work is directly related to it), like the work of the Flemish Primitives, the great Italian masters of the Renaissance … I like the classical art for the spirituality, with which it breathes. But I have a pretty eclectic tastes: I was fascinated by contemporary artists, contrasting themselves to traditions and extremely disrespectful relating to the basics of sacred art!”

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