Ingrid Baars - L'Afrique ! (signed) - Fine Art Publishing 2013

Ingrid Baars graduated from the Willem de Koonig Academy in Rotterdam in the early 1990s and worked as a independent illustrator and photographer until 2009 when she decided to concentrate solely on her artistic work, wich previously coexisted with her commercial activities.  Her signature style came into being and grew from collage to full-blown digital treatment of her images. L'Afrique ! is a fascinating ongoing project inspired by the richness of African cultural heritage in all its diversity, incorporating as it does both the human and the non-human. The amalgamation of classical African cult objects and real woman enables the artist to transcend the natural and constitute an outerwordly realm that feels near but that is, upon closer inspection, quite unsettling.
Also known for her pictures featuring creations of Iris van Herpen, Heaven Tanudiredja, House of Malakai or Laurel DeWitt, she succeeds in evoking a phantasmagorical universe thanks to her innate sense of aesthetics and quintessential style.
Introduction  “Aesthete, you say ?” by Sandra Agbessi - “Ingrid Baars, Layering of faces, constructions of the real, parameters of the human.”  by Barbara Vanderlinden.