Thérèse BONNELALBAY (1931-1980) - Lot 28

Thérèse BONNELALBAY (1931-1980) Untitled, 1979 Ink on paper. Signed and dated lower right. 49.5 x 31.5 cm Provenance : Collection Jean-Jacques Plaisance, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris. Born into a working-class family, Thérèse Bonnelalbay worked as a nurse in a Marseille clinic when she married Joseph Guglielmi, a schoolteacher and poet. Both activists in the Communist Party, it was during political meetings that she produced her first drawings. These were initially influenced by Far Eastern ideograms, which also inspired poets such as Henri Michaux and Christian Dotremont in their quest for a hybrid form of writing, where drawing and text merge. In 1967, she took part in the historic L'Art Brut exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She disappeared on the night of February 16, 1980, and was found a month later near the Suresnes locks.