Monique Gies, Zonder titel, 1977, acrylverf op papier, 27 x 37 cm © Monique Gies. Courtesy of Galerie Christophe Gaillard

In 1977, Monique Gies, then 43, abruptly left her family and comfortable life and fled to a small room in Paris. In about a year, she produced about a hundred paintings: empty interiors permeated by a kind of 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 situated in strange wooden constructions or enveloped by a bag or a bottle. The almost monochrome paintings - where the colours brown and pink predominate - show a world in which no human seems to be present.
Yet they make what cannot be seen tangible, painting after painting.

Monique Gies painted these works in 1977-1978 hoping to keep herself out of the psychiatric hospital. Only in 2021 did she talk about the trauma that had haunted her all her 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. This autumn, they will be housed for the first time in a museum context, at the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent.