NATHANAËLLE HERBELIN

Born in 1989 in Israel
Lives and works in Paris, France

In her pictorial practice, Nathanaëlle Herbelin builds bridges between the intimate and the political, the personal and the universal: each painting stems from a lived experience or relationship, bearing witness to the various contexts she navigates, which she reveals without distortion. Her unique forms and colors explore the characteristics, nuances, and connections between her subjects, within compositions where invention and observation subtly intermingle.

Franco-israeli painter based in Paris since 2011, Nathanaëlle Herbelin graduated in 2016 from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA) and was invited in 2015 to attend the Cooper Union (New York, United States).

In 2024, Nathanaëlle Herbelin presented a solo show at the Musée d’Orsay (Paris) in which her works were shown alongside paintings by the Nabis. Other solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her in Paris, France (Jousse Entreprise Gallery, Hôtel de Guise, Dilecta, Yishu 8, 2021), at Umm el-Fahem Gallery for Palestinian Art (Israel, 2021), in China (He Museum, Foshan, 2025; George V Art Center, Beijing, 2020), in the United States (Emmanuel Barbault Gallery, New York, 2019), in Brussels, Belgium (Xavier Hufkens, 2023/2025; IN-BOX, 2018).

Her work has also been presented, among other places, at Centre Pompidou Metz (2025), Bozar (Brussels, 2024, 2025), Villa Sauber (Monaco, 2025), at MO.CO (Montpellier, 2023), at MASC – Sables-d’Olonne (2023), at the Musée Estrine de Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (2023), at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole (2023), at the Mucem (Marseille, 2022), at the Fondation d’Entreprise Pernod Ricard (Paris, 2017 and 2022), at the Centre d’Art et de Recherche Bétonsalon (Paris, 2019) and at Collection Lambert (Avignon, 2017).

Her paintings have been included in several public and private collections, such as those of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (2018), Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix (Les Sables-d’Olonne, 2019), Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Paris, 2020), Frac Champagne-Ardenne (Reims, 2021), S.M.A.K. (Ghent, 2022), Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation Galeries Lafayette (Paris, 2022), Frac Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand, 2022), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2023, 2025), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2024), Museum of Tel Aviv (2024).

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Nathanaëlle Herbelin grew up in a small village in central Israel between a French father and an Israeli mother. It was in Tel Aviv that she learned painting, alongside Russian and Ukrainian artists who arrived there in the 1990s. From this land, she keeps her taste of the desert, silence and culture of the Negev Bedouins, as well as a close link with nature. Her work as a whole is underpinned by a contrast between a great tension and a certain sweetness. And her melancholy does not exclude, here and there, traits of humor and a certain lightness.

A few years ago, Nathanaëlle Herbelin was questioning the possible connection between her painting and photography. Today, that questioning has given way to new paradoxes and new ambiguities. She is hunting petty, commonplace episodes in reality. Once found, she examines them on the surface of her paintings in a mixture of mundanity and poetic transcendence, which is usually encapsulated in a dash of faintwit. Her most realistic pictures are the most ambiguous, for example the large interior inspired by Georges Perec’s Les Choses, which is also the library in an apartment lent by a painter friend. It expresses her fascination with the idea of one’s own house, somewhere between tangible presence and fictional world.

Recently, odd scenes have appeared in her pictures, like comments on what she might have done, had she been an abstract painter. They are hijacked memories of the school of fine arts: unrecognizable views of exhibition sites, nooks in studios, a trestle whose shape conjures up a metal module, an easel, or the remains of an installation, a black box for showing videos, which resembles a monochrome in front of dark red walls. Just a few months older, a small still life showing a piece of flattened cardboard, found on the ground in a street, is not an abstract sculpture, but one of those protective things that you put around a takeaway coffee cup to stop your fingers being burnt.

At the same time, and running counter to this research—or rather in exactly the same vein Nathanaëlle Herbelin has embarked on a new adventure: portraits of strangers, made haphazardly from encounters in the street and in the rooms of a museum, and portraits of close friends who have posed for her, either alone or in groups, they, too, the receptacles of stories we shall never know. To start with, they looked away, then, increasingly, they now face their present and the oldfashionedness of painting […]

Anaël Pigeat
November, 2017

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