Pierrette Bloch


Pierrette Bloch was a Paris-born Swiss painter and textile artist.

Early life

Pierrette Bloch was born on June 16, 1928 in Paris. In 1939, Bloch and her parents left France for Switzerland to escape the war. At the age of 15, she began living on her own in a hotel, which she says helped foster very early on a complete sense of independence and autonomy. She began her professional artistic training at the end of the 1940s, taking courses in the plastic arts in Paris.

Career

Bloch began exhibiting her works in Paris and the United States in the 1950s. The ensemble of her works have their roots in the use of "poor" materials such as ink, paper, mesh, and horsehair. The last of these, horsehair, began appearing in her work in the 1970s, with her first sculpture using horsehair created in 1979, and have become one of the key symbols of her work. The corpus of her work thus spans mediums, including drawings, collages and three-dimensional pieces, and falls into the category of postwar abstraction. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
A monograph on Pierrette Bloch was published in November 2013 by Musée Jenisch.

Death

Bloch died on July 7, 2017 in Paris at the age of 89.

Biography

« J’entreprends un long voyage sur une feuille, je m’enveloppe dans ce parcours ; ce n’est plus une surface, mais une aventure dans le temps. Le format n’existe plus. »