Christine Sefolosha (Swiss; b. 1955)

"Sefolosha paints bone, fur, flesh, and spirit enmeshed in the same plane. Bird is mammal is reptile is ghost. Sefolosha’s work evokes myth, metaphor, and ancient stories casting her as griot of her own timeless tribe. A sense of distant, lost time saturates the images: yet any tangible reference to such is utterly absent and unnamed. In her symbolic language, shapes become luminous apparitions, whispering something personal and private. Sefolosha’s images feel like communications, messages sent to the artist from another plane, a mystic view beyond the apparent.”
--From “Phantoms”, a book about Christine Sefolosha’s art by Leslie Umberger, Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Christine Sefolosha was born in 1955 into a German-Swiss family, which had settled in French-speaking Montreaux. She began drawing as a child, often during bouts of chronic insomnia. Shortly after leaving high school in Neuchâtel, she married a white South African; in 1975, she moved with him and their baby to South Africa, where they settled in Johannesburg. Here she took up painting and drawing and attracted by their music, she began to move among black people. In 1983, she divorced her husband to marry a black musician called Sefolosha. The couple lived in Kensington, the black section of the city, but apartheid soon drove them out of the country. They returned to Montreaux but shortly afterwards, both her parents died, and her husband returned to his homeland. By 1986, she was living alone with her three children in her childhood home. She began to paint and draw anew, inspired by her years in Africa, which she described as “an experience which won’t let you go and which made me want to give voice to everything about existence which is suspended, transitory, subject to chance”.

When Sefolosha works, she loves to crouch on the ground, stretching across large sheets of thick paper to apply somber pigments with her hands, using vigorous, splashing gestures. She learned to mix her paints with dirt and tar, creating a synthesis of sophistication and crudity, which is reminiscent of the work of the Paleolithic cave painters of Lascaux or Altamira. Her typical figures are wild animals—wolves and birds of prey, hybrid creatures of the earth, sea and sky with bristling antlers, wings and claws, usually shown leaping or writhing in conditions of stress and anxiety. Now and again, she will depict a vulnerable young creature curled up in sleep. Recently, Sefolosha adopted a more diaphanous style, applying pale watercolors to delicate Japanese paper, while still exhibiting the spontaneity that imparts life in her indeterminate and visionary imaginings.
--Roger Cardinal

Christine Sefolosha has work in many private and public collections, Including the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Musee de Cite de Creation in Begles, France.