Dorothée Selz was born in 1946 in Paris, where she lives and works. Born into a family of art collectors and niece of the art critic Jean Selz, in the seventies she came into contact with the so-called ‘Catalans in Paris’ and collaborated in the edible and festive rituals organised by Miralda, Joan Rabascall and Jaume Xifra. Her early collages that question the place of women in the media already incorporate references to edible elements. Over the years, her sculptures, paintings and collages have dialogued with popular culture and ethnography in different parts of the world. Offerings from Bali, Mexican sugar figures and handicraft objects from different continents are incorporated into her works with the intention of erasing the boundaries between high and low art. With a language close to Pop, Selz builds sculptures covered with edible materials such as fruits and sweets that she calls ‘ephemeral edible sculptures’. Designed specifically for each space and built in a festive way with the participation of the public, they form a combination of the visual, the gustatory and the playful.
Since the seventies, she has exhibited in spaces such as the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (1983) and the French Institute in Buenos Aires (2006) and Rio de Janeiro (2011). She has made installations in the public spaces of the American Craft Museum, New York (1988), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000) and the Louvre Museum, Paris (2005), among others.