The Wild Project Record

An independent record of Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2015–2022), and the artists it showed.

Artist dossier

Sabine Pigalle

WPG.01 — In Memoriam, 2 Oct – 21 Nov 2015

Born
1963, Rouen, France; lives and works in Paris
Formation
Studies at the Sorbonne; four years working with Helmut Newton in fashion photography
Medium
Staged photographic tableaux after the Old Masters
Record at the gallery
WPG.01 In Memoriam – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2 Oct – 21 Nov 2015)

Sabine Pigalle holds the first record number in this catalogue. Born in Rouen in 1963 and based in Paris, she studied at the Sorbonne and then spent four documented years working with Helmut Newton on fashion photography before turning to personal projects — a formation examined at length in this journal's essay Before In Memoriam: Sabine Pigalle's years with Helmut Newton. She has exhibited regularly since 2002 in Europe and Asia, showing in Tokyo for the first time in 2006 and again in 2009 in the No Man's Land exhibition staged in the former French Embassy buildings.

Her mature work is a sustained negotiation with art history. In hybrid photographs that digitally fuse photography and painting, Pigalle reinterprets the Flemish primitives, the German and Italian Renaissance, and the Mannerists — Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Holbein, Lippi, Vermeer, Cranach and Dürer all figure among her stated references — transposing their compositions onto contemporary sitters until past and present become deliberately confused. The major series follow that program. Timequakes, shown at the Nexus Hall in Tokyo in 2014, splices contemporary portraiture into the fabric of old paintings. In Memoriam, the series of composite Old-Master portraits that came next, was presented for the first time as the inaugural exhibition of the newly founded gallery in Luxembourg: In Memoriam – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2 Oct – 21 Nov 2015), record WPG.01, the show that opened the space at 22, rue Louvigny weeks before the first Luxembourg Art Week. Night Watch, published as a volume by Éditions La Pionnière in 2017, nods to Rembrandt in its title while staging mannerist nudes — Venus, Lucretia, Eve — in dark, allegorical arcadias drawn from Giorgione, Michelangelo and their contemporaries.

The work has continued to find institutional venues in France. Most recently, Passé-présent – Château de Kerjean, Saint-Vougay, Finistère (26 Apr – 2 Nov 2025), organized by Chemins du patrimoine en Finistère, presented eight of her portrait photographs after the Old Masters inside the Renaissance château — the same method the Luxembourg public saw at the gallery's opening, a decade on and inside the kind of building her pictures quote.

The Pigalle file

Sources

  • L'Œil de la Photographie, "Sabine Pigalle inaugurates the Wild Project Gallery," 2015.
  • International Photo Magazine, "Sabine Pigalle: In Memoriam," 2015.
  • Sabine Pigalle, published artist biographies (Google Arts & Culture entry; gallery CVs), on Rouen 1963, the Sorbonne, and the four years with Helmut Newton.
  • Nexus Hall, Tokyo, Timequakes exhibition record, 2014.
  • Éditions La Pionnière, Night Watch, photographies de Sabine Pigalle, 2017.
  • Chemins du patrimoine en Finistère, Passé-présent, Château de Kerjean, 26 Apr – 2 Nov 2025.