When my mother was a little girl, she often played with paper dolls, exchanging carefully cut clothing with her girlfriends. Endless hours were enjoyed in the imaginary world created by her scissors and these magical cut-outs. As an adult, mom has safely tucked away the dolls in a shoebox. What if creativity can take this pastime to another level of artistry where paper is cut, folded, and painted on the way to being transformed into shimmering visions of beautiful clothing and luxurious living?

This is the art of Belgian painter, designer, and interior decorator Isabelle de Borchgrave.

Isabelle's story begins in a little house in Sablon, which she turned into a studio. There, she gave drawing classes to her friends’ children and other neighborhood children. Liberated to think about her own designs, she surrounded herself with processions of hand-painted clothes, rolls of fabrics strewn about, pigments, brushes, gouaches, canvasses, pastels and travel journals. Following a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1994, Isabelle dreamed up paper costumes. While keeping her brushes in hand and her paintings in mind, she worked on four big collections, all in paper and trompe l’œil, each of which set the scene for a very different world. “Papiers à la Mode” (Paper in Fashion), the first, took a fresh look at 300 years of fashion with historical authenticity, combined with startling realism. Causing an overnight sensation when they were first shown in France in 1998, the dynamic, light-hearted collection has traveled all over the world and achieved critical acclaim many times over.
Although a painter by training, textile and costume are her muses. Working in collaboration with leading costume historians and young fashion designers, de Borchgrave crafts a world of splendor from the simplest rag paper. Painting and manipulating the paper, she forms trompe l’oeil masterpieces of elaborate dresses inspired by rich depictions in early European painting or by iconic costumes in museum collections around the world with astonishing details.

Yet in a 40-year career, she has never put aside the thing that has always guided her in her life: painting. She still exhibits her paintings and her large folded paper works all over the world and produced three books. With an imagination increasingly stimulated by her knowledge and interpretation of art, Isabelle, a follower of the Nabis movement, has a fresh perspective of a world that "flies around her like a dream".

The exhibit opens at the Legion February 5th and runs through June 5th. Paper dolls a cut above the rest... xoxo-Sonya