Anne Giscard d’Estaing is a French visual artist who lives and works in Paris.

At the age of 52, I suffered a stroke and had to learn to speak all over again.

After a long battle lasting 2 years, I realized that this was an opportunity for me, a new lease of life.

My many hospital stays are an opportunity for me to draw inspiration from colorful medical scans. Expressing myself artistically is no longer a simple passion, it becomes a real necessity, an obsession, a need. My palette becomes much more colorful. They're waves, jets of energy, splashing around.

It's also a force of nature that I seek to recapture through the involvement of my body and gestures, almost a dance, a trance. It's the birth of a new magical language that I can access through the upheaval of my brain. It's a gaping hole or a peach whose scar I'll always carry, but it's also a proud trace. I'm always surprised when I wake up, because I don't know what my hands have been able to produce; it's as if I'm a stranger to the creative process.

In my canvases, there's a beating heart that brings the flowing blood (the water of life), as well as references to the landscape through aerial cartography.

My work expresses a very important lifeline that the aborigines call dream paths, an immaterial space at once past, present and future. It's a path that carries my optimism for life, a river that feeds my canvas.

"The work is not a tool for making magic, it is magic itself." Gisueppe Penone, February 26, 2017.

Anne Giscard d’Estaing
March 1st, 2024