Born in 1955 in southern France, she died in 2016 in Canada. Martine Birobent lived for 22 years in the bohemian Canadian and Montreal district of Plateau Mont-Royal, where she occupied a mosaic covered studio in an alleyway. She moved out and founded La Galerie des Nanas in Danville in 2011 in the Quebec Eastern Townships. She has been very active in Montreal, participating in many solo and group exhibitions, working live on TV or building art-cars. More recently she’s had an exhibition at Paris Halle Saint-Pierre, galerie Le Coeur au ventre in Lyon and was artist in residency at the fifth Biennale d’art hors-les-normes, she participated at the Outsider Art Fair with Galerie Bourbon-Lally in 2013 and 2014, OAF Paris in 2015 with Polysémie from Marseille. She paints, sculpts wood, resin constructions on recycled materials structures, she also does textile and knitted works.
Birobent is extremely difficult to corner. She is part of a non-academic new generation of outsiders, sometimes attracted by pop surrealism. She has a very strong signature, one of a women artist in her fifties, having worked in poor surroundings elementary schools a large part of her life, and reacting to our world in a very unique bitter-sweet way.
She is now involved full time in art, installation and performances and has turned herself to the Web and international art fairs to gain more attention. Her current bodies of work, the “Muzzled Dolls” and “Broken Childhood Wooden Coffins”, are compulsive dives into crochet or wood cutting, improvising infinite variations on the theme of mouth shut women or abused kids.
« I’ve stopped smoking again and I’m rebuilding myself one knot at the time, slowly, painfully. 50 knots for 19 puffs. My lips are sealed and my fingers sore. I’m filling this emptiness and addiction giving birth to new born burning babies and fighting womens trapped in their own web. I’m seeking to give them out trough International adoption. Help me ! Help them ! »
The Muzzled Dolls shown on this website have been shown at « Contemporary Istanbul 2009 » and « Affordable Art Fair New York 2010 » and are part of a series of more than fifty wild Muzzled Dolls produced by Martine Birobent in 2009-2010.