Christine Ravaux

Contre Sens (against the Grain)

1999

Christine Ravaux is a Belgian artist, who uses nature in much of her work, which is both hyper-realistic and abstract in pattern. She was born in Charleroi, in 1961. She studied printmaking at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Brussels and the Etterbeek Academy of Arts, where she learned more specifically, the black-way in the workshops of Mauritius Pasternak and Anne Dykmans. She received the Prix du Hainaut, in 1994 and the prize of the 1997 annual competition in the artistic creation of the Royal Academy of Letters, Sciences and Beaux-Arts of Belgium. Ravaux's mezzotints mirror her surroundings. She has portrayed the black hills that dot the landscape of the Belgian mining city, in which she lives and has captured the shadows and shapes created by the grasses and trees of her own backyard. Her close-up look, at the ordinary things around her, is just as effective when viewed as abstract compositions of form and light. Her work was awarded the first prize at “IBIZAGRAFIC ’92”, the prestigious Spanish Biennial, which prompted a solo exhibition of her mezzotints and the publication of a monograph. In 1994, she was selected for inclusion in “Intergafia ’94”, World Award Winners Gallery in Katowice, Poland.