Network is an ongoing series project of small paintings on wooden panels, just 8 x 6cm, that started in 2015, with individual works being added as the creative spirit moves. As so often the theme is young women’s relationship with mobile technology and social media.

Sylvia Rehbein of the Thomas Rehbein Gallery in Köln (which presented a major exhibition of Dubois’s work in 2020) writes, ‘With a wink, Joëlle Dubois transfers the digital revolution and the resulting role of humans in our modern society into her works. She is especially interested in the voyeuristic aspect of digitalisation. Social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, television programs like Big Brother, fulfil our desire to observe others anonymously in their suffering – their love life, their successes and failures. Digitalisation has made communication faster, more purposeful and interactive, but it means that less and less privacy is possible, and we present ourselves more openly and more naked to everyone else. Communication becomes increasingly superficial, impersonal and anonymous. Dubois devotes herself with passion to this complex of topics in an ironic and comical way. She depicts her protagonists in an exposed and unadorned manner, steeped in a drastic realism that often turns out distorted in the digital world. By showing hairy chubby women and men in compromising positions, she emphasises her own role as an independent and emancipated woman and artist. Dubois is a silent observer, watching the world in her own display of idiosyncratic perfectionism.’