About Karine Mimoun,
French Mixed-Media artist
From Fragment to Symbol
Karine Mimoun is a French artist whose work lies at the intersection of sculpture, painting, and mosaic. Using hundreds of individually sculpted, molded, and painted faces as her primary visual vocabulary, she creates symbolic compositions in which the fragment becomes image and the individual gives way to the collective. Her work explores identity, memory, and our shared humanity through a singular visual language, driven by a central question: what unites us beneath our singularities?
At the foundation of her practice, Karine Mimoun has chosen the human face as her tesserae. Each face is sculpted by hand, moulded, then cast in plaster. The painting draws from the natural world, the mineral, the organic, the elemental, as a reminder of our deep connection to the matter from which we are made.
Assembled on sculptural grounds whose textured reliefs radiate outward from the central figure, these faces give rise to symbols whose force exceeds the sum of their parts. The experience unfolds in three movements. First hypnotic, as the eye moves from fragment to fragment. Then seized by the power of the emerging symbol. Finally meditative, held by the quiet energy of the textured field that surrounds it.
At a moment when identity, belonging and collective memory are urgent questions in contemporary culture, Karine Mimoun’s practice asks what it means to exist as an individual within a collective consciousness, and what we are building together as fragments of a shared humanity.
Critical Recognition
« Karine Mimoun develops a singular artistic approach in which every fragment becomes a carrier of memory. By combining painting, sculpture and mosaic, she elaborates a visual language that unites the rigour of detail with the force of collective symbol, unfolding at several levels simultaneously: sensory, aesthetic and symbolic, summoning the memory of civilisations, collective consciousness and the unity of the living. »
Agathe Anglionin
Exhibition Curator, Art Critic,
Member of the CEA
(French Association of Exhibition Curators)
1-Cosmogony,
the Inaugural Collection
1-Cosmogony is Karine Mimoun’s inaugural collection, and its title says everything: the number 1 is not a sequence but a statement. Unity. The conviction that beneath the multiplicity of faces, civilisations and mythologies, something fundamental holds us together.
The collection includes five large-format works, four mixed-media paintings and one sculpture, each evoking a deity from a lost civilisation through her signature practice of sculptural mosaic. The Lamassu of ancient Assyria, the Moai of Rapa Nui, Khepri of ancient Egypt, Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica and Viracocha of the pre-Incan Andean world: five figures drawn from civilisations separated by centuries and continents, each one composed of hundreds of individually sculpted faces painted in trompe-l’oeil to evoke precious stones. Seen up close, the works reveal themselves as an accumulation of distinct human presences. Seen from a distance, those presences dissolve into the force of a symbol. The fragment and the whole. The individual and the collective. One.
Karine Mimoun’s Artistic Journey
Trained at the Haute École d’Arts Appliqués (HEAD) of Geneva (Switzerland), where she graduated with distinction and the congratulations of the jury, Karine Mimoun built her early career as an art director for luxury houses including Dior, Cartier, Guerlain, an immersion in the relationship between craft, material and meaning that left a permanent mark on her artistic sensibility.
Art was never far.
In 2010 she founded Madamepopandkids.fr, an innovative start-up transforming children’s drawings into personalised art objects, awarded the Prix de l’Entrepreneuse.
She was commissioned to create large-format paintings for restaurant and clubbing venues across France, and intervened as a practising artist for Dior and Louis Vuitton.
Each chapter of her career, however different in form, was driven by the same conviction: that art belongs everywhere, and that every medium is an opportunity to push it further.
In 2022, drawing on three disciplines she had explored and mastered separately, painting, sculpture and mosaic, she developed a visual language entirely her own, giving rise to 1 Cosmogony, her inaugural collection, three years in the making.
Selected Exhibitions
- 2026 — Solo, Atelier Grognard, Rueil-Malmaison. 1-Cosmogony and small formats.
- 2014 — Solo, Vernon. « Birds & Women »
- 2005 — Solo, Salle Wagram, Paris. Large-format « Faces of icons »
- 2004 — Solo, Palo Alto (Publicis Group), Paris.
- 2001 — Group exhibition, Talent Brut, Paris Bercy
Awards & Distinctions
- 2010 — Entrepreneur Award (France) category Product of the Year (Madamepopandkids.fr)
- 1998 — Prize from the Cantonal Visual Art Fund, Switzerland), for museographic work at the Fondation BAUR, Geneva
- 1997 — Board of Directors Award, HEAD Geneva for the quality of her graduating thesis
Education & Training
- 1992–1997 — HEAD Genève. Higher diploma in visual communication, distinction with congratulations of the jury.
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