Elsa Dax

Elsa Dax (born 14 May 1972) is a French painter and a member of the Stuckists art movement. Major themes in her work are myth, legend and fairytale.

Life and career

Elsa Dax was born in Paris, and educated at the Sorbonne where she gained an MA in cinema, Russian art studies, Constructivism and Suprematism. She promoted the second Paris Stuckist show in 2005.

In 2005, she illustrated a children's book. In 2006, the Tarot Museum in Bologna acquired a Tarot deck, which she had designed in 1999.

Dax was one of the ten "leading Stuckists" in the Go West exhibition at Spectrum London gallery in October 2006.

In 2008, she was the first signatory a petition to the prime minister asking him not to approve Sir Nicholas Serota as Tate director.

She spends her time divided between Camden in London and Paris. She is now a full-time artist. As well as painting her own work, she is also a collector of other Stuckist paintings by Ella Guru, Charles Thomson, Bill Lewis, Philip Absolon, Rémy Noë and Ruth Stein.

She is married to John Kerr, an architect.

Art

Dax said that she chose her themes of myths, legends and fairytales as "I find reality terribly sad and cruel. I need to escape to another dimension," and that her style has been likened to Chagall's. A large body of her paintings are of Greek mythology, composing a mass of figurative detail. She respects the force of nature.

Research for a painting is a combination of academic books on the subject and infant picture books, which leads to a few weeks' mental preparation for the main elements. The first part of the painting is the central character, around which other images evolve in an imaginative process to "discover images like you might discover figures in a cloud." It takes her three months to complete the painting.

She has said of her work:

Solo shows

2002, Westminster Gym, Houses of Parliament, London 2002, Lourdes Museum, Pau, France

Gallery

Notes and references