2013 Prix Canson®: Virginia Chihota

Virginia Chihota as seen by Vincent Huguet, Beaux-Arts Magazine:

There is nothing tender about the dolls drawn by Virginia Chihota: there is often a distressed look across their face, reminiscent of the figures by Egon Schiele, and their features sometimes reveal an almost savage hardness. For this series, the artist took
her inspiration from the dolls used in Zimbabwe for the animistic rites linked to fertility. Now living in Tripoli, she also uses engraving, painting, printing or silk-screening in her work, but drawing holds a special place of its own: “drawing for me is a therapy that enables me to release the tensions that are all around me, and at the same time to celebrate each day as it comes. Drawing also always leaves room for the rest and opens onto ideas, the lines of which run on into my life.”