Artist's Bio

Birgitte V. Philippides was born on January 8, 1968 in Westchester County, New York to a Danish mother and a Greek-Peruvian father. As a young girl, she was constantly taken to museums and art gallery shows by her mother, also a painter. She was exposed to some of the great museums of the world in London, Paris, Tokyo, Germany, Italy, Greece, Brazil, etc. and of course New York City. Growing up surrounded by art, by an early age, Birgitte knew that art would play a big part in her life.

In 1985, Birgitte left home to study Film and Television at Boston University and took summer courses in French and Art History in Paris at the Sorbonne and the American College in Paris. She eventually graduated from the State University of New York at Purchase with a degree in French and a minor in Spanish.

Shortly after, Birgitte started painting by chance, in the summer of 1992. Her return home to her parents' house had made Birgitte miserable. In an attempt to cheer her up, her mother, Kirsten, placed a brush in Birgitte's hand one Saturday afternoon and told her to try to paint her mother's portrait. Birgitte at first resisted but eventually started to paint a child-like, abstract nude of a distraught female from both the front and the back. She painted the words above the figure, "She's So Glamorous."

The experience stuck, and soon after, she began to embellish her paintings with words and titles and subsequently came up with a distinct style of her own. The act of communicating what she felt inside and putting it on canvas was immediately a powerful experience for Birgitte, like a new language. She was able to express how she truly felt about many different things that she never had the courage to verbalize. Her early pieces, with titles like "She's Starving," "She's A Good Girl," "She Throws Up A Lot" and "She Eats Too Much" reflected her newfound empowerment, and were instrumental in helping her overcome a nine-year battle with bulimia.

While the sense of liberation that Birgitte found in painting was thrilling, to say the least, not everyone was so happy. Although her parents were the first to encourage Birgitte with her work (and supported her by buying supplies), her paintings caused quite a lot of pain within the family. Her mother was conflicted, simultaneously thrilled that her daughter was painting but horrified, tearful and embarrassed after seeing each piece that she finished. Her father was amused, but silent, and her brother was clearly mortified.

Over the course of two months Birgitte painted a total of six pieces and then gave in to familial pressure. She hid her paintings in her childhood bedroom closet for six years and periodically rescued a few of them from her mother's garbage bin. Her painting had become too painful for everyone involved, it seemed.The following fall, Birgitte moved back to New York and pursued a career as a make-up artist.

In May of 1998, Birgitte met a fellow artist while on a trip to
California. He insisted she begin painting again, telling her, "It's
obviously in your blood." Following his advice, by the end of the summer of 1998, Birgitte had completed several more works. This time courage won out over pain, and Birgitte felt strong enough to pursue her work as a painter despite outside pressure.

For the next seven years Birgitte would document on canvas the many highs and lows of her life living in New York City. Several experiences from this period profoundly affected her art. Foremost among these was losing her father to cancer in 2002. This experience is depicted in many heart-wrenching pieces like "Her Daddy's Got Cancer," "Her Daddy's Dead," and "She Misses Her Daddy."

About seven months after her father passed, Birgitte fell in love with a man who profoundly changed her life. The relationship, simultaneously tumultuous and healing, was documented in a series of works on paper in nail-polish. These works originally began as simple prototypes for upcoming paintings but soon took on a life of their own and became complete pieces in themselves. Some of the titles from her nail polish series include "He Set Her Free," "She's Very Angry At Him," "He Fucked Her Brains Out," and "She's Healed."

Riding on the prodigious output that this relationship inspired, Birgitte has continued exploring themes of love, sex, celebrity, body image and relationship through her work.

Pablo van Dijk
Kunst Editions, New York