Jean-Christophe Philippi was born in Strasbourg in 1963. He started drawing at the age of 13 under the influence of an uncle who was a painter. As an adolescent he became increasingly preoccupied with painting and drawing. In high school he focused on plastic arts. At the age of 18 he started exhibiting in Strasbourg galleries and later in Colmar, Basel and Hamburg. At the same time he studied literature and specialized in the writings of Montaigne.

 

At the age of 23 he became a professor of French. He lived in Pas-de-Calais and kept his distance from the art world but continued to paint and draw in secret without attempting to exhibit his works. At 30 he moved to Paris where he worked under difficult circumstances at a school in Seine-Saint-Denis.

 

He fell into a depression which took several years to overcome. He then rediscovered his desire to paint using a variety of techniques to manipulate both materials and colors. Philippi frequently creates anthropomorphic forms with intense and haunting expressions. Other characters, sketched with lead or color pencil and given depth through the crisscrossing and cross-hatching of lines, appear equally mysterious but less terrifying.

 

Philippi still lives in Paris. He paints every day as soon as he is free from his job as professor, and sometimes into the night.