Lili Simon

Lili Simon was born in 1980 in Mulhouse (France). She lives and works in Toulouse (France).

Lili Simon studied at the Beaux-Arts in Toulouse, where she developed a strong interest in drawing, ink work, and the appropriation of images. Fascinated by the iconography of the early twentieth century, she collects and reinterprets visual material drawn from magazines, encyclopedias, and vintage prints, transforming them through subtle shifts that often introduce humor, irony, or a sense of the absurd.

She recently rediscovered the practice of needlepoint, which she had done without much passion as a child. Working with vintage canvases found in flea markets and second-hand shops, often depicting hunting scenes, still lifes, or pastoral landscapes ; she began to intervene directly within these traditional motifs. In 2025, this process led to the project “Mecs en slip” (guys in underwear). The series emerged from a certain weariness, a fatigue with the overrepresentation of the female body in art. By inserting male bodies borrowed from advertising imagery into these existing canvases, Simon playfully subverts both the conventions of art history and the domestic tradition of needlework.