Nathalie David
Biography
"For me, documentary is not a genre, but a way of engaging with the world – a poetic act of resistance, where observation becomes empathy and storytelling a search for truth beyond facts."
– Nathalie David
Nathalie David (born in 1963 in Rouen, France) is a filmmaker, illustrator, and photographer. Her work exists at the intersection of documentary perspective, artistic research, and poetic visual language. She does not regard the documentary as a mere genre, but rather as an independent artistic process, a method of investigative engagement with people, places, and stories. She responds to what she perceives as injustice and transforms it into poetic works that provoke reflection, always without aggression, driven by the belief that violence cannot bring about meaningful change.
Her practice encompasses films, drawings, photographs, and artist books. David works across media; her visual language is both delicate and precisely structured, inspired by artists such as Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Annette Messager, and David Hockney, whose radical subjectivity and attention to the everyday have become formative references in her work. At the core of her artistic exploration lie themes of visibility, memory, and the relationship between personal experience and collective history. It is a search for meaning within transience – a form of storytelling in which images, words, and lines carry equal weight.
Questions of origin, belonging, and rootedness are central to her artistic inquiry. Her delicate floral drawings are not only influenced by the romantic imagery of Philipp Otto Runge but also reflect biographical traces. Growing up on the Côte d’Azur, between mountains and the sea, her work is deeply shaped by natural motifs, flowers and animals as carriers of personal resonance. In her childhood memories, lush gardens exist alongside devastating fires. The experience of exclusion and racism during the 1980s, particularly in the context of the rise of the Front National, also continues to inform her artistic practice.
Nathalie David studied Fine Art at Villa Arson in Nice and at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg under Katharina Sieverding, Sigmar Polke, and Franz Erhard Walther. She continued her education with study stays at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques under Pontus Hultén in Paris and received a directing fellowship at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf with Helke Misselwitz. From 1992 until her death in 2013, David worked closely with photographer Leonore Mau. Since 2003, she has produced film portraits of artists and collectors on behalf of international museums and institutions – works she situates "at the intersection between exhibition and catalogue."
In 2009, she founded the label PITCHOUNPRODUCTION, under which numerous independent films have since been realized. Her works have been presented at institutions including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Louvre in Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Goethe Institut in Los Angeles the Zurich Film Festival, and Filmfest Hamburg. Often, she intertwines portraits of well-known figures, such as Harald Naegeli,,GEGO or Paula Modersohn-Becker, with her own distinct, poetic-artistic signature.
Exhibitions
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