FANJUL Claire

Claire Fanjul
Illustrator, engraver, and cartographer of imaginary worlds

Claire Fanjul was born in 1986 in Liège, Belgium, and currently lives and works in Lille. She has been drawing since childhood and exhibited for the first time at sixteen. This early start signals an artist for whom drawing is a primary language.

Training between engraving and experimentation

Alongside a master's degree in Fine Arts and then a thesis, she developed her practice and learned engraving and etching techniques. From the burin to the digital palette, from the ink-dipped pen to the Posca marker, she readily switches from one tool to another. This freedom is the hallmark of her work. Paper remains her preferred medium, but she also draws on three-dimensional objects: ostrich eggs, ceramic skulls, wooden spheres, and designer furniture pieces.

A fantastic bestiary

Her sources of inspiration include the repertoire of Flemish and German primitives, as well as everyday life. Gradually, human figures have disappeared from her compositions in favor of a hybrid and fantastical fauna, reminiscent of medieval bestiaries, inhabiting improbable architectures. Hatching, dots, grids, textures, and stippling form the basis of her graphic vocabulary, which she continuously enriches.

Utopias: imaginary cartographies

In 2018, fascinated by ancient nautical charts, she created imaginary worlds populated by various monsters, along with a new alphabet. Since then, she has been developing the Utopia series, drawings made with Posca on wooden spheres, showcased at the Art22 Gallery in Brussels, Azart Gallery (New York, San Francisco, Miami), and in Paris at the Galerie Artima.

Journey and collaborations

2018: her first illustrated musical tale, Les Bottes de sept lieues, was published by Harmonia Mundi / Little Village.

2019: the Arte program Métropolis dedicated a report to her in May. Her works were also presented at La Halle Saint Pierre, a museum of outsider art, as part of Hey! Act 4, which brought together thirty-five international artists.

2020: release of La Folle Parade, her first design for a silk scarf published by Hermès Paris. In the same year, she presented Les Utopies de Claire Fanjul at the Galerie Artima in Paris.

2021: exhibition Le Nouveau Monde, also at the Galerie Artima.

2022: she created two animated films based on her drawings for the grand workshop of La Source, as part of the Gérard Garouste retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. She also presented Creatures, a fantastic bestiary in comic form, at the Calais Museum of Fine Arts, and participated in the collective exhibition In Choro Bestarium at the Taylor Foundation from November 25 to December 17, with a cosmographic drawing on linden wood spheres.

She also creates graphic works for luxury brands and illustrates children's books.

Acquiring a work by Claire Fanjul

Our art gallery, located in Metz and available online, is proud to offer a selection of original works by Claire Fanjul. Among them:

- prints, inheriting from her engraving training

Dive into the meticulous and poetic universe of Claire Fanjul, an artist who brings entire worlds to life with her hatching, dots, and textures, where each creature tells a story and each map invites you to travel.