Nathanaëlle Herbelin

Born in Israel in 1989 to a French father and an Israeli mother, Paris-based painter Nathanaëlle Herbelin has developed a distinctive pictorial language that occupies a singular place within the renewal of contemporary figurative painting. Her paintings capture the immediacy of lived experience while remaining attentive to memory, emotional presence and imagination. Through an acute act of observation, they reveal how the personal and the collective continually intertwine.

In her work, Herbelin transforms everyday life into poetic, quietly resonant narratives, approaching moments of intimacy as well as broader social realities with an empathy attuned to nuance and context. From those closest to her, complete strangers, landscapes and domestic interiors, as well as formative experiences such as birth, parenthood, loss, and grief, she reveals overlooked details with remarkable sensitivity, inviting viewers to recognise rather than discover her subjects. For Herbelin, painting is both a way of belonging to the world and of caring for it—a space in which hierarchies dissolve, giving rise to a sense of shared presence that is at once unsettling and wondrous.

Nathanaëlle Herbelin (b. 1989, Tel Aviv, Israel) obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016, during which time she was invited to participate in an exchange programme at The Cooper Union, New York. Selected solo institutional exhibitions include Feel the pulse at the He Art Museum, Shunde (2025); Être ici est une splendeur, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2024); À la surface, le fond de l’oeil, French Institute of Tel Aviv (2022); Et peut-être que ces choses n’ont jamais eu lieu, Umm Al Fahem Palestinian Art Center (2021), Devenire Peinture, Yishu 8 prize, George V Art Centre, Beijing (2021); and group exhibitions such as the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2021); Passerelle Art Center, Brest (2020); the museums of the Abbaye Sainte-Croix (Sables d’Olonnes, 2019); Bétonsalon, Paris (2019); the Beaux-Arts Museum of Rennes (2018), Collection Lambert, Avignon (2017) and Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017).