Exhibition at the Musée Estrine: Lena Vandrey

The Lena Vandrey donation, made by her partner Mina Noubadji-Huttenlocher, brings together an exceptional collection of over thirty works tracing the singular career of this highly talented artist.

Lena Vandrey was born in 1941 in Germany, which became Poland in 1945, and showed an obvious virtuosity for drawing and painting from an early age. She chose Paris and France as her exile, a land she would never leave. She modelled for Ungaro for a time, became involved in feminist circles and befriended Niki de Saint Phalle and Monique Wittig, with whom she collaborated on several occasions.

At the end of the 1960s, she made a radical change of direction, leaving Paris to settle in the austere highlands of the Gard, in an isolated farmhouse cut off from the world. There she developed a powerful body of work inspired by art brut, in which sacred figures of women abounded: Amazons, Warriors, Jeannes, etc. She returned to the Estrine gallery after the very first exhibition of her career in 1969.

This donation is part of a series of donations bringing together some of the most prestigious collections of modern and contemporary art: the MNAM-Centre Georges Pompidou, the FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the MASC in Les Sables d'Olonne, the Musée Cantini in Marseille, the MAMC in Saint-Etienne, the Carré d'Art in Nîmes and the Collection d'Art Brut in Lausanne.