Vidya Gastaldon was born in 1974 in Besançon. She lives and works in Grange Neuve (Ain), France. With her mystical, fantastical and extremely vivid approach to art, Gastaldon develops a sort of harmonisation of spiritual and physical qualities. Allergic to any attempt to control and restrain her universe, she delivers a cosmic overview combining Hindi divinities, Muppet Show characters and Christian references. Her work, reminiscent of artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Charles E. Burchfield, and William Blake, is extremely multifaceted and deals with the divine, the hallucinatory, and everyday life. In a mixture of sacred, sensual, tongue-in-cheek and sometimes provocative creations, she establishes a connection between “being” and “meant to be”. She engenders new beliefs, and by means of negative and positive impulses, she pushes social unconsciousness out of the way, liberating our collective thought of the predefined egregores that oblige us to keep reproducing spiritual and social patterns.

Her work is part of the collections of Frac Normandie, Rouen; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest; Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Jenisch Museum, Vevey; Kunstmuseum Bern; CNAP, Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Collection Région Piémont, Turin; KADIST, Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Selected solo exhibitions include Océan sentimental, Centre d’art contemporain Les Capucins, Embrun (2022); J’aurais voulu qu’on s’aime tous, Wilde, Geneva (2020), Objets peints au feu de bois, Art : Concept, Paris (2019); Push the earth with your knees, the sky with your head, Art Bärtschi & Cie, Geneva (2017); Les Rescapés, Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables d’Olonne (2016); Hello From the Other Side, Art : Concept, Paris (2016); Tu es monstrueux et je t’aime beaucoup, MAMCO, Geneva (2012); Domaine de Kerguehennec, Bignan (2009). In 2019 her work was part of the group exhibition Futur, ancien, fugitif at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.