French artist Amandine Urruty's illustrations are wonderfully bizarre

Date
23 June 2015

There’s something charmingly bizarre about Amandine Urruty’s illustrations. Like Victorian portraits, the French artist’s characters sit quietly, are well-behaved and have excellent posture but the subjects and the commotion that surrounds them is what makes them so interesting.

Each picture is drawn using graphite and the detail and imagination is fascinating with all sorts of weird and wonderful imagery crammed in. One child has a disco ball for a head, another is surrounded by miniature squashes and tiny, balloon-headed people and various others wear grotesque masks. Amandine’s style is so beautiful that she brings this odd sense of normality – we accept these characters completely but the curiosity they conjure is what draws us into Amandine’s strange but genteel world.

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Amandine Urruty: Family Portrait II

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Amandine Urruty: The Lesson

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Amandine Urruty: Pear

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Amandine Urruty: All About Love

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Amandine Urruty: Disco Ball

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Amandine Urruty: Egg Triptych Part I

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Amandine Urruty: Lightning

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Amandine Urruty: Family Portrait III

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About the Author

Rebecca Fulleylove

Rebecca Fulleylove is a freelance writer and editor specialising in art, design and culture. She is also senior writer at Creative Review, having previously worked at Elephant, Google Arts & Culture, and It’s Nice That.

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