Thérèse Bonnelalbay French nationality Born in Magalas on July 23rd, 1931 Dies in Ivry-sur-Seine in 1980

Thérèse’s father was a coalman. She moves to Marseille in 1950. There she works as a nurse. She also becomes a member of the Communist party. She gets married in 1959 and has two children. In 1963, during one of her political meetings, she begins to doodle with an ink pen on a piece of paper. She continues to draw, encouraged by her husband. In 1957, the family moves to Ivry-sur-Seine. Thérèse disappears during the night of February 16th, 1980. A month later, her body is found in the Seine near the docks of Suresnes.

Thérèse Bonnelalbay’s first drawings are quite figurative. One could perceive profiles and vegetation shapes. Her later works become more free and develop into an abstraction recalling the drawings of Henri Michaux or those of Emmanuel “le Calligraphe”. She uses her own mysterious ideographic writing, recreates her own vocabulary, like an alphabet with new meaning. A pictorial expression of hypnotic force that escapes all definition.

SEE ALSO: Art Brut, Collection de l’Aracine, musée d’Art moderne, communauté urbaine de Lille- Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 1997. Publications de la Collection de l’Art Brut, fascicule 11, Lausanne, 1982.

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