Born in 1989 in Nice, Jeanne Berbinau Aubry trained at the Villa Arson, graduating 2015. During this time, she honed a practice that looks at the different states of matter and the illusions created by different natural phenomena, such as light and electricity. Combining traditional craft with modern techniques, her pieces set out the dialectics between the visible and the invisible, halfway between alchemy and the reappropriation of modernity’s various scraps. As well as taking part in several collective exhibitions, she has joined the Nice artist-run space La Station, while also completing various residencies, including in Kalga in the Himalayas (2015), at the Villa Medici in Rome (2016), at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris (2019) and at the Fondation Fiminco in 2020. She has just completed a long research stay at the Jan van Eyck Academie, in Maastricht. 

For her first solo exhibition, Il faut bien des failles pour laisser passer la lumière, (We need cracks to let the light in) in 2022 Berbinau Aubry exhibited different pieces that attest to her work on the mutations and permutations of matter. With Liqueurs (2016), she exhibited different plants and insects collected during a residency at the Villa Medici. Placed inside test tubes and immersed in alcohol, these still-lifes demonstrate the sensitive connection to natural forms and their conservation. Similarly, she uses the Japanese technique of kintsugi, which involves repairing broken ceramics using gold powder, to produce light-conducting family plates. “Each of her works,” writes Marianne Derrien, “produces resistances, while we are left with a sense of danger to remind us that we should not trust appearances.” 

Bernibau Aubry’s work has been supported in recent years by numerous organisations, such as the Fondation Bernar Venet, the Université Côte d’Azur, the Fondation Fiminco and the Île-de-France Region. As such, she has exhibited variously at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson (Nice), Point Commun (Annecy), Galerie Doris Ghetta (Ortisei), La Friche de la Belle de Mai (Marseille), the Salon de Montrouge, Galerie Bubenberg and the Espace Topographie de l’Art (Paris). Between 2022 and 2023, she was laureate of the second edition of the Villa Van Eyck, where she drew on various structures linked to the Van Eyck Academie, especially laboratories. It was an opportunity to continue her visual art work, as well as meet different figures within an international and multidisciplinary group.