I was born in Damascus Syria, to a Lebanese father and a Polish mother. I grew up in Poland and later moved to a war-torn Lebanon. In my teens, I moved to Greece and then Cyprus. At the age of 17, I left Europe to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. After that, I started my career as a fashion designer and a textile artist. In 1992, I moved to London to explore Fine Arts and in 2004, I graduated from The Chelsea School of Arts. In London, I got married and had 4 children. At present, we all live in Greece. I am a fluent speaker in Greek, English, French, Arabic and Polish.

My art has always been my origin and my destination, my home; my reference point to a life that is constantly changing. I would like to create awareness and emotion to connect the viewers to their inner selves and also to explore how the individual has distanced him/herself from a sensitive human nature, approaching dependence on objects and a senseless reproduction that reflects our consumer society today. I try to awaken and sensitise individuals anew through my art. The subliminal use of color, serving as traces of hope among the greys and blacks that represent the torment between desperation and hope becomes a primary tool of expression in my hands.

My Journey…

My first professional encounter in the world of art involved textiles. I found that textiles opened up an unlimited scope of imagination and creativity. I was one of the first to create a new process of engineered prints on textile that did not exist in Active Sportswear at the time. The engineered prints were created by hand on silk and spandex. After working in the fast-paced New York textile and fashion commercial market, I felt the need to divert my love of creating art on textile into creating art on canvas. In 1999, therefore, I moved to London to explore Fine Arts.

My first attempt at artwork focused on human emotions of daily life in all their rawness and urgency, using brushed oil on canvas as a means of expression. I moved on to investigate hand painting techniques through the use of oil and presented my UNCOVERED Exhibition in London. The entire body of this work deals with human emotions and how they are expressed. It was about starting with a blank canvas, without any previous ideas, notes, sketches or thoughts. It was about getting out of bed, feeling like a certain color and applying its variations to create an image from my feelings. It was about time; the time that we have or not have - one go, no changes, no going back to it, no alterations. It was a sign of the times, an era when time is crucial and directness is natural. I achieved my end result by emptying the tubes of paint directly onto my hands and making them my palette, my fingers acting as brushes. I felt the paint directly applied on the empty canvas and experienced a closeness with my subject matter.

Photography was my next pursuit that guided me towards the immense horizons of visual and digital art. This whole new world of creativity with the immediacy of digital art really absorbed me and led me to a new direction.

Influenced by the strong shipping tradition in Greece and by learning the stories of how the historical Liberty Ships were an important contribution to the outcome of WW II, I developed a new collection entitled “Liberty” that was presented in the Museum of the SS Hellas Liberty in Piraeus, Greece in June 2011.

In parallel, the economic crisis was seeping more and more into our daily lives. So my “hero” was born: a digital faceless man dressed in a business suit, struggling in today’s society while simultaneously addressing a message of change. So my collection “Just a Number” was born. In this collection, modern man is portrayed, with humour at times, as a dispensable individual in suit, devoid of his value as a unique human, now posing as numbers within economic units and struggling to survive. I used multiple layers of Perspex as a medium as it creates a simultaneous background, middle ground and foreground impression that enabled me to move back and forth through reality and illusion. Greys and blacks dominate and represent despair at the prospect of an uncertain future while the subtle use of colour adds traces of hope for tomorrow.

Many a time, I have wondered how man can deal with this decadent state. The answer came from the collection “#iFollow” where issues such as the need for connection, feelings and love contrasted with faceless men, empty suits, and random objects of vanity which depict the conflict of our current society. Today’s generation is occupied with the social media that have evolved creating insecurity and distance from reality. The work cries out for a sense of honesty, trust and open communication in order to break down isolation. It is artwork with high aesthetics and a twist of humour that touches on an obvious but also delicate topic of our society. It creates a keen sense of self that the viewer is challenged to contemplate on. “LOVE”, the rubber heart, jumps out and you just want to cuddle it to connect with the faceless man! To enliven, this collection I used multiple layers of cardboard and oil paint on cardboard, framed in clear plexiglass boxes.

In 2017, the above collections were unified in order to be exhibited in the Bouziani Museum in Athens, Greece under the title of the latter “#iFollow”. The museum juxtaposed pieces of my collection with artwork by Yiannis Gaitis, an established Greek artist (1923- 1984). Moreover, the museum put the exhibition “#iFollow” in dialogue with Documenta14 that was held at that time in Athens and for the first time out of Kassel.

“Although Brigitte Polemis carries inside her the European wealth along with the Eastern sensitivity, she was won over by the American Puritans, the simplified emblematic forms, and the ideas developed in the pop art movement,” states Eurydice Trichon Milsanis, PhD in the History of Art by the University of Sorbonne and she follows: “Stylised drawings, spot colours, black-and-white, Jenny Holtzer-like text statements, create a voluntarily impersonal atmosphere. Plexiglass overlays beautify the image that looks mechanical, as if not formed by human hand. Perfect and detached, she speaks to us in a cold idiom about today’s world: a mechanised, shallow, homogeneous world whose cruel and irrevocable path into an uncertain future is what Polemis criticises.“

Silicon, resin and plexiglass sculptures complement the collection, not as separate objects but as creations that have literally sprung from the table. The choice of materials is not random. Materials have life and in conjunction with shape, they emphasise the contrast between true and false, important and insignificant, natural and constructed, secure and insecure. The synthetic materials represent over-fabricating inhumane competition, changing our world as we know it whereas the shape of the heart determines the primordial and primary need of man for contact, connection, emotion, companionship and finally… happiness.

My constant need for answers moved the strings of my heart and mind to turn to Greek philosophy and its answers about human existence. Plato and his theory on the Platonic Solids stirred my imagination so my first pieces of the collection “Platonic Solids” were created. Exploring the meaning and use of platonic solid shapes, I used my art to create my own version of how the universe relates with the human form. In my Platonic Solids series, the human form within the geometric art acts as a unit, which then repeats itself while the solids maintain their integrity and follow the rules of nature. Placing the platonic solids artwork in a space aims to provide a subconscious universal medium. Plato associated the solids with the classical elements that he believed made up everything in the universe: earth, air, fire, water and cosmos. The pieces of my collection facilitate the expansion of consciousness with the power of the platonic solids to create a pure connection and place man in his position in the universe.

My works of art make a lasting impression and after being exhibited, they stand as a mental and emotional kindling fire that arouses the individual’s desire to react and possibly improve the way he/she feels, thinks and lives. “For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories” Plato says.