Christine Rebet

Rebet has devoted her practice to the act of drawing, creating lush and labor-intensive hand-drawn animation.

This survey exhibition presents five films made between 2015 and 2025 by Paris-based artist Christine Rebet, which play consecutively in the Pamela Bass-Bookey and Harry Bookey Gallery. Rebet has devoted her practice to the act of drawing, creating lush and labor-intensive hand-drawn animations marked by vivid color and lively images that change and morph alongside lyrical voice-over narrations. “I am interested in preserving hand-drawn animation for myself because it is my act, my gesture,” Rebet has explained. “My gesture is to draw. The magic of the hand.”

In her films, Rebet imagines and invents visual forms for forgotten rituals, sacred landscapes, and oral histories. Her works are born out of travel and research in places as diverse as Jamaica, the Persian Gulf, Thailand, London, and Rebet’s own childhood home in Lyon, France, locales where she meets and collaborates with local experts—including musicians, monks, and archaeologists—bringing their knowledge to life through the medium of drawing. The films put historical fact in tension with objects, ideas, and traditions whose forms are unknown, emphasizing the slippery and enigmatic aspects of human knowledge and history.

Christine Rebet (French, born 1971)
The Fall, 2025
Animation shot on HD, sound
5:19 minuntes
Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York