Fanny MICHAËLIS Et c'est ainsi que je suis née

Comics creator, children’s book and press illustrator, singer and musician, Fanny Michaëlis is a multi-media artist whose work dances back and forth between the real world and the world of the imagination, between poetry and news, images and words. Fanny Michaëlis treats comic strip as a language in itself and in Et c’est ainsi que je suis née, her most recent album (Éditions Casterman), the drawings spill beyond their borders, exploring the margins of what is depicted. Michaëlis writes in images and draws in words, turning the medium of comic strip into an opportunity for graphic and narrative experimentation. The Huberty & Breyne, Paris | Chapon 21 gallery is delighted to be showing a selection of original plates by Fanny Michaëlis from 24 January to 21 February 2026.

Fanny Michaëlis initially gravitated towards painting and the plastic arts before enrolling at the Institut Saint-Luc, in Brussels. There she was introduced to the graphic and narrative avant-garde of the bande dessinée world thanks to the likes of Eric Lambé and Thierry Van Hasselt and readily embraced the medium and its experimental potential. The publications Géante and Le Lait noir (Éditions Cornélius) saw the development of a distinctive drawing and prose style, the two subtly harmonised on the page. With Et c’est ainsi que je suis née, Michaëlis offers her readers something of a dark fairy story, part political fable, part social chronicle, the story of a woman who is born tucked inside herself and only gradually opens up to engage with the world. The book begins with a powerfully symbolic birth scene – a mute father figure hiding behind his beard, a screaming mother whose eyes have disappeared behind her wide-open mouth, from which a “curled up” baby girl emerges, head tucked inside her body. From the start, the body is exposed, constrained, trapped in a power relationship involving the gaze of another, involving shame, anguish and the desperate will to survive. The story – written and told in multiple voices – allows the author to engage with the intimate and the collective, the individual and society, while exploring the fragility of life and the forces that are brought to bear on it. The central character, whose facial features change as the story progresses, embodies the introspective process of a human being wresting him-/herself from a separate identity to become a part of “us”. And the individual journey mirrors a wider conflict, a violence that radiates out from the individual to incorporate the social body.

Fanny Michaëlis’s drawing style changes constantly, veering between minimalism and luxuriance, realism and abstraction, expressionism and stylisation. From clean pencil strokes to blurred expanses of grey (achieved with the use of a rubber), curving forms to ruler-straight lines, what remains a constant in these drawings is poetry as a space of resistance. With Fanny Michaëlis, black creates white, and the energy of the material becomes the carrier of meaning. Bodies are transformed and heads get heavier, break apart, change scale and perspective, until they are sometimes no more than a sign within a visual choreography. Lines – lines of force and vanishing lines – extend across the page to create geometric shapes, then bend, warp, break, giving way to spillover effects, uncouplings, improvisatory and expressionist gestures. The pencil’s velvety softness intensifies, becomes a sooty smoke in a stroke that screeches and grinds in a final riotous movement. As page follows page, form and content merge, phrases become an integral part of the composition of the image and words occupy a new and novel space. Letters are drawn, shapes write, and the text becomes movement, offering us an arrangement where words, gestures and drawing are all perfectly coordinated.

This exhibition invites us to admire a work in movement, where each plate is a place of tension and metamorphosis, where drawing thinks, where text acts, and where the body becomes the battleground between force and freedom.  

PRIVATE VIEW
Friday 23 January 2026
from 6:00 p.m.
in the presence of the artist

CONCERT
by Ludovic Debeurme and Fanny Michaëlis
followed by a book signing by Fanny Michaëlis
Saturday, January 24, starting at 6 p.m.

EXHIBITION
From Saturday 24 January
to Saturday 21 February 2026

PARIS | Chapon - 21
21 rue Chapon, 75003 Paris
Wednesday > Friday 1:30 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Saturday 12 p.m. - 7 p.m.