17.03.14 12:18 PM

Béatrice Bissara has lived in the world of art since she was born. Her childhood spent in museums, flea markets and the atmosphere of auction rooms with her father, a classical art connoisseur, forged her taste for classical beauty.Yet, though she never left that familiar world far behind, it took her several years to discover her creative vocation.

After studying finance and management, political science and the history of art, she went to work for a modern art dealer and then began appraising old pictures, especially from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at Sotheby's. Being thoroughly trained in the History of Art but self-taught in practice, she did not begin painting and sculpting until 2000, without forsaking her 10-year-old interest in wet-plate photographs developed primarily in black and white. Her passion for volume and color even prompted her to take evening stylism courses at the Chamber de Couture and modeling courses at the Rose Bertin High School in Paris.

In that period she frequented the ADAC (City of Paris) and other studios in search of a teacher of the art of design, painting or sculpture. But she wound up learning her craft "on the job" by working with models and by means of meetings which had a decisive impact on her vocation. Her meeting with the sculptor Petrus, who devotes himself almost entirely to stone-carving in his studio in the Bastille district of Paris, initiated her into anatomy and measurement.

She has been exhibiting since 2002 in galleries and shows, including the Independent Artists' Shows.Now concentrating on sculpture in bronze and sometimes transparent resin, she pursues her quest for beauty, balance and harmony of bodies, faces and souls in figurative art.

Still desirous of giving her work a spiritual dimension, she is working on a set of sculptures revisiting the faces of biblical characters.