Painter and sculptor of Moldavian origin, based in France from 1952, died in November 1999.
Life
Mirabelle Dors came from Moldavia in 1952 with the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca, then her partner. Welcomed in Paris by André Breton, she settled first in Montmartre. Her date of birth, often given as 1913, remains uncertain; the sale catalogues that give her death as 1991 are mistaken.
In the early 1950s she met the painter Maurice Rapin (1927-2000), whom she married in 1954. The couple settled in Vélizy-Villacoublay. Together they led artists’ collectives outside the official circuits, the Jeune Peinture and then Figuration critique, and from 1971 to 1980 co-signed joint publications with the Tendance populaire surréaliste led by Rapin.
The work
Her work fills space with masks, totems, dolls and chimeras. The “populations of images”, which recur throughout her work, are its most characteristic form; the auction house responsible for her studio describes this work as surreal, repetitive and “popular”. She worked in low and high relief, sculpture, mixed media, heightened collage and oil on panel or hardboard.