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Caroline Gaumy is a Belgian artist whose work is rooted in her classical studie at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, while being to this day deeply inspired by the brash, colorful and multi-layered culture of the United States, which she first encountered during her studies at Los Angeles City College in the late 1990s.
Caroline was not trained as a mosaic artist, but one day when she took scissors to her wallet of embossed credit cards, as have many before and since, her practiced eye perceived the artistic potential in the pile of glittering, colorful plastic shards.
And there on the kitchen table in Los Angeles, using the remains of that consumerist tool, she re-assembled them into the most emblematic symbol of America for a foreigner, the statue of Liberty (titled, Très chère Liberty ). Her rebellion became inspiration and revealed her preferred art form. American popular culture, which she observed with the fresh regard of an artist from abroad, became her preferred subject.
Her collages/mosaics are all made from fragments of credit cards, pieces of our daily desires, reshaped into playful, colorful reimaginings of everyday artefacts of American culture. She plays with the contrast between credit cards – the ultimate symbol of consumer society – and the colorful and lighter works of art she composes with them.
Each piece is a dialogue between innocence and irony, between the serious world of adults and the imagination of a child who still believes that everything can be reinvented and enjoyed without prejudice.
Between frequent trips to America, Caroline works out of her studio in Brussels. Surrounded by her family and her parrots she works in an office by day and dons her artist’s smock by night – inhabiting a world somewhere between routine and reverie.
hilosophy
"I aim to reinterpret the world we call home by blending its spiritual and material artifacts in unexpected and intuitive ways..."
nspiration
“The world of my art starts with fragments of credit cards — everyday objects full of desire and habit. I transform them into colorful, playful compositions that leave behind their original function. Beneath their glossy surfaces lie echoes of childhood — a bright, curious place I never fully left. This sense of wonder guides the way I see, assemble, and reinvent the world in my work.
I like to play with the contrast between credit cards — the ultimate symbols of consumer society — and the artworks they compose, which evoke a lighter world, seemingly free from any connection to money…”
Caroline Gaumy
