Gabi Jiménez

Gabi Jiménez is a French painter and artist... and Gitano. A citizen dedicated to the memory of the Gitano tragedy in France during and after the Second World War, he exhibits his paintings throughout France and Europe.

In 2007, he represented France in the first Roma pavilion at the Venice International Biennale d'Art Contemporain, a milestone and a turning point in the perception of contemporary Gypsy art. There are numerous collective and solo exhibitions in which the artist represents the Roma and Traveller community and activates through these works so that French and Europeans can open their eyes to asituation that worsens year after year: discrimination in expulsions.

In 2013, after his personal exhibition at DIHAL - Interministerial Delegation for Housing and Access to Housing - in Paris, the French state bought him two canvases representing "Le Grand Paris". Then, in 2014, Gabi Jiménez is nominated by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and receives the "Painting and Visual Arts" award for all his work, which is militant and committed. In the same year, the President of the European Court of Human Rights acquires one of his works, which is nowexhibited in the judge's chambers.

In 2016, the work "Caravan under two cypresses", which was already on display at the Venice Biennale in 2007, is exhibited in San Sebastian (Spain), the European capital of art, during the exhibition "Tratado de Paz" To represent peace and among more than 300 works by artists such as Goya, Rubens, Murillo, Picasso, Ribera, Sophie Ristelhueber.

Gabi Jiménez's paintings are done in bright, singing colours, drawings with traces surrounded by black, stylising the travellers' culture and never reducing it to simple clichés. Behind the raptures of detail and joy at first glance, however, lies a very different truth: that of a shameful history of discrimination, violence, hatred and displacement. A history that is still relevant since the time after the Second World War.