Mireille Zagolin: creator of dreams and of tangible beauty.

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Born in 1958, Mireille Zagolin grew up in the Swiss Alps.  The power of the mountains and the lively village of her childhood awakened her creative talent.  She absorbed and savoured everything, and began using her hands to mould the clay in the garden.  Fiercely independent, she later moved out of the family home and settled on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she met her future husband, with whom she had a son.

 

Painting took Mireille rather by surprise.  A friend talked her into taking a silk-painting course, and that struck a spark.  Art became a real passion and, learning by doing, she turned out painting after painting, landscapes and nudes, on silk at first, then on canvas.  After a time, dispensing with models, she started to give voice to her inner world.  Though often dreamlike, it was a world firmly rooted in the beauty of tangible reality.

 

After 15 years of painting, Mireille felt a need to move into three dimensions and let her hands forge a deeper acquaintance with the human body, so long a source of fascination.  In 2005 she opened her sculpture atelier in Nyon. Human forms, feminine for the most part, in clay or bronze, began to take shape, forms whose sensual curves she loves to exaggerate. 

 

Mireille Zagolin has never stopped painting, though: female figures emerge from the oils, in hues of red and pink or tinged with a tender blue, always done with a sensitivity of eye that seeks out emotion, light and the dream state. At other times the artist plays with layers of paint in abstract canvases, as though turning to the mountains she sprang from, to draw on their strength: there is a mysterious mineral quality to these, a lightness combined with the solidity of rock.

 

For inspiration Mireille looks to the natural world she discovers on her walks, and to the human body, which she loves with a passion.  The feminine, personal encounters, love and the motion of life are recurring motifs. 

 

Mireille’s more recent work has become sparer, focusing on the essential and inviting us into a spacious expanse occupied by a powerful presence. Here we see nature in its spiritual dimension, while human beings are never far away, they too mere flickers of light.

 

Cheerful and enthusiastic, Mireille loves to share her creations with her audience, whether online or in person, at her atelier or in exhibitions.

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"English version: Nigel Lindup"