Artist - Sabrina Dufrasne - Sab_B-17

Sabrina Dufrasne

Sabrina Dufrasne works by directly citing the vocabulary of ancient civilisations — moving through Etruscan funerary painting and ornamentation, through the Minoan frescoes of Knossos — not as decorative reference, but as a system of signs she reactivates to build a narrative of her own. She takes concrete, recognisable figures and recomposes them into new scenes that no longer illustrate ancient myths, but a contemporary fable about the relationship between the human and the animal.

Dufrasne recovers the aesthetics and authority of the ancient Mediterranean as a critical tool for the present. She pushes us towards the past and leaves us there, contemplating, measuring the distance between that reconstructed world and our own. Through silent contrast, it reveals what the present has lost. The animal is neither a decorative motif nor a metaphor: it is a full subject. It dominates in scale and colour. The human, when it appears, does so diminished, subordinate, or transfigured. It is a visual hierarchy inverted from the one that governs today, in which the animal has been expelled from the symbolic circle and reduced to production, consumption, and entertainment.

This loss is observed both in the subject of the work and in its material form.

Dufrasne paints on coarse textiles — usually jute — aged, frayed, with the appearance of rescued fragments, hung from a piece of wood or an old frame with metal studs, as if they were banners or tapestries torn from a wall. They resemble a relic, a transferred fresco — evoking the historical technique of the strappo — creating the illusion of standing before a genuine archaeological artefact rather than a contemporary work. The patina, the losses of pigment, and the tears are not accidents: they are part of the language. The support, then, does not illustrate the loss: it sustains it.

Born in 1978 in Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium, Dufrasne began her artistic career later in life, turning to painting to provide good care for her rescued animals. Her debut exhibition was in March 2026 at the KEWENIG gallery in Palma. Sabrina Dufrasne lives and works in Mallorca.