In 1977, Monique Gies, then aged 43, abruptly left her family and her comfortable life behind and fled to a small room in Paris. Within a period of one year, she produced approximately one hundred paintings: empty interiors permeated with a threatening haze, a rocking horse over which a white shirt has been thrown, but above all, images of countless dolls. Dolls without heads, without limbs, dolls inside strange wooden constructions or enclosed in a bag or a bottle. The almost monochrome paintings – where the colours brown and pink predominate – show a world in which no human being seems to be present. Yet they make what is not visible tangible, painting after painting.
Monique Gies painted these works in 1977-1978 hoping to keep herself out of the psychiatric hospital. It was not until 2021 that she opened up about the trauma that had haunted her throughout her entire life: an abusive past as a child by her uncle, nicknamed NonNon. Suddenly, her children saw the true meaning of her paintings. Monique Gies' daughter and Galerie Christophe Gaillard now take on the task of bringing the oeuvre out into the open. In October 2024, for instance, the works were on display for the first time at the gallery in Paris, where they attracted great interest. Now, they will be housed for the first time in a museum context.