Increasingly becoming known for her bold, glossy figurative works addressing social media, loneliness and identity, the Belgian artist Joëlle Dubois grew up in Ghent, where she still lives and works. She studied at the LUCA School of Arts, and after graduating in 2015 showed her work at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, and won the audience award during the Coming People awards in 2016. She also studied illustration at the University of the Creative Arts in Maidstone in the UK in 2012, and took a ceramics course at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea, in 2014.

As well as her paintings and drawings which are exhibited regularly, she also does editorial illustration work for the newspaper De Morgen. In recent years her work in recent years has been deeply shaped by her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s – she has produced a body of work entitled Forget Me Not responding to that experience, and a book, I Am My Mother’s Daughter, including self-portraits and poignant depictions of her mother, crafting a poetic meditation on connection, identity and healing.

Wouter de Vleeschouwer, the founder of Convent, a gallery for contemporary art in Ghent, has written, ‘In her work, Joëlle Dubois examines the impact of social media without subjecting it to any explicit critique. Her interest in new technologies grew when she spent time in South Korea. She observes the unusual human behaviour that she sees around her. Inspired by the constant stream of photos and videoclips on the internet, Dubois confronts the viewer with explicit scenes of private life. By means of playful improvised compositions, she captures both the surfeit and the transient nature of the images. In her colourful figurative paintings on wood, she depicts crucial issues of gender, sexuality and fetishism.’

Joëlle Dubois’ website can be found here, and her Instagram account here.