Nicole Charbonnet - Magnolia (After JPR)

Nicole Charbonnet

In all of her work, Charbonnet appropriates images from the visual cultural world in which we are all immersed, such as art, films, cartoons and photographs; therefore, her work is a statement about the illusion of originality. It illuminates the idea that all art is an authentic forgery, and the view that creativity is memory because everything that is created owes much to existing images and work previously made by others.

In this body of work, Charbonnet incorporates images of flowers appropriated from other artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Ellsworth Kelly. The flowers are painted on, and then subsequently cut out, covered over, sanded off or repainted. The artist constructs surfaces utilizing an additive and subtractive process, which involves the manipulation of layers of collage, paint, fabric and different acrylic mediums.