Coming from a family in which her father was a charcoal burner, Thérèse Bonnelalbay left for Marseille in 1950, where she worked as a nurse. She married in 1959 and had two children. In 1963, during a meeting of the Communist Party of which she was a member, she began doodling in ink on a piece of paper. Encouraged by her husband, she continued to draw.
In 1975, the family moved to Ivry-sur-Seine. One night in February 1980, Thérèse Bonnelalbay disappeared. Her body was found a month later near the locks of Suresnes.
In her early drawings, which are quite figurative, one can perceive the beginnings of profiles and vegetal forms. Then her gesture became freer and her work evolved toward a form of abstraction, reminiscent of Henri Michaux or Emmanuel Deriennic—a kind of mysterious ideographic writing, as if Thérèse Bonnelalbay were reinventing a vocabulary, an alphabet with a hidden meaning.
BONNELALBAY thérèse
