Inès Longevial (b. 1990) French

Inès Longevial (born in 1990 in Agen) lives and works in Paris. Drawn to drawing from an early age, she discovered painting through books on Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani in her family library. Later, the works of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Georgia O’Keeffe, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Pedro Almodóvar further enriched her visual universe and informed a practice deeply rooted in colour as an emotional language. After studying applied arts in Toulouse, graduating in 2013, she moved to Paris, where she decided to devote herself fully to painting.

Portraiture quickly became the focus of her research. Often inspired by her own face or those of people close to her, her female figures nevertheless transcend any autobiographical dimension. Stripped of explicit narrative, they become spaces for projection, where light, chromatic variations, and fragments of the body convey inner states rather than identities. Contours dissolve, flesh tones take on unreal colours, and faces become landscapes. Her painting does not seek to faithfully represent reality, but rather to make sensations, emotions, and memories visible.

Over the years, her visual vocabulary has expanded. Self-portraits have given way to large fragments of bodies, flowers, hands, and inner landscapes, followed more recently by drawings and monotypes that reflect a new graphic freedom. Drawing occupies an essential place in her creative process, as does poetry, which has recently extended her exploration of image and intimacy through the publication of Visage Théâtre.

Since 2020, Galerie Ketabi Bourdet has closely supported the development of her work. The inaugural exhibition Before the Sun Sinks Low, presented at the Grandes Serres de Pantin, marked the beginning of this collaboration and introduced her work to a wider audience despite the context of the pandemic. This was followed by World on Paper in 2022 and Perchée in 2023, reflecting the evolution of her practice towards a freer, more monumental, and more luminous form of painting.

At the same time, Inès Longevial has gained increasing international recognition through exhibitions at Christie’s Paris, Van de Weghe in New York, The Journal Gallery, FIAF, the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Agen, and later Almine Rech in London, Shanghai, and New York. In 2024, she took part in the exhibition Le Jour des peintres at the Musée d’Orsay, confirming her position on the contemporary French and international art scene.