Born into a modest family, the daughter of a coal worker, Thérèse Bonnelalbay moved to Marseille in 1950, where she worked as a nurse. She married in 1959 and became the mother of two children. In 1963, during a meeting of the Communist Party, of which she was a member, she began drawing spontaneously with ink on a simple piece of paper. Encouraged by her husband, she gradually developed this practice into her own form of artistic expression.
After moving to Ivry-sur-Seine in 1975, her work evolved from early figurative drawings — featuring profiles, plant-like forms, and recognizable motifs — toward a unique form of abstraction. Her gestures gave rise to a mysterious graphic language composed of signs and shapes resembling an imaginary alphabet.
Her compositions reveal an intimate visual vocabulary, at the crossroads of drawing and writing, where each mark seems to preserve the memory of an inner world. Despite the brevity of her artistic career, her work reflects a profound exploration of signs, gestures, and the mystery of creation.
In February 1980, Thérèse Bonnelalbay disappeared. Her body was found a month later near the Suresnes locks. Her drawings remain the testimony of a singular artistic journey, in which personal expression becomes a form of universal writing.