MARIKO
FLORENCE COMBESCURE

(Avignon, July 11 th 1958 )

Florence Combescure was born in Avignon on 11 July 1958, moved to Africa at a very young age, and grew up in Madagascar, where she was fascinated by the work of local artisans from her teenage years onwards. 

During those years, she deepened her knowledge of different sculpture techniques by travelling between Kenya, Mauritius and Île de la Réunion, as far as Corsica and the Ivory Coast.  For Florance, the time spent in Kenya was the moment when, at only 12 years old, she approached sculpture thanks to her acquaintance with the Maasai tribe. At the age of 14, Florence had already decided to become an artist, but as she was too young to attend art school, she took private lessons from the director of the School of Fine Arts in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where she had moved with her family. Her art has always been influenced by Salvador Dalí, whom Florence likes to call “that true friend” whom unfortunately she never met’.

Mariko’s artistic inspiration, in her own words, came about when she went to Figures in Spain, Salvador Dalí’s birthplace, where in silence and contemplation she found new sources of creative inspiration.  In the early 1980s, Mariko left Africa to continue her artistic training in France, where she studied clay art and sculpture at the Beaux-Arts de Montpellier. 

The choice to depict THE REVOLT OF THE SAMURAIS OF SHIMABARA in the saddle of imposing rhinoceroses, an animal for which Salvador Dalí had a morbid obsession, is certainly not accidental.  Today in her workshop in the small Corsican village of Santa Lucia di Talla, Mariko, always accompanied in her deepest and innermost self by her “friend Salvador”, creates her surrealist-inspired art.