Julia Scalbert
Acrylic painting, ceramics — body, abstraction, and figuration
Information
Based in
Marseille, France
Status
Avanvue selection
Medium
Acrylic painting, ceramics
Overview
Born in 1984, Julia Scalbert lives and works in Marseille. She graduated from the Nîmes School of Fine Arts in 2009 and regularly exhibits her work in France and abroad: Marseille, Lyon, Annonay, Meymac, Brest, and Seoul. In 2015, she won the Prix de peinture Novembre in Vitry.
Her work is paced by an alternation between painting and ceramics, whose dialogue draws her repertoire of forms and her chromatic range, situated in the in-between of abstraction and figuration. Her recent research, inspired by recurring motifs in art history, bathers, acrobats, dancers, explores the body through more intimate and sensual presences.
My view
I chose her in June 2026.
What moves me about Julia is a tension she never seeks to resolve, between the body and abstraction. Her sensual forms borrow from the bathers and dancers of art history without ever directly quoting them, she digests them. Each canvas seems to be born from the preceding one, in a vocabulary that nevertheless remains always recognizable. This is a painting that takes its time, and makes it visible. I saw her in Marseille this summer. We talked about nothing but painting, and how she got there.
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