About Magalie
Visual artist who shares her unique vision of architecture and the world.
Biography
Magalie Descamps is a Belgian visual artist. From an early age, she was intrigued by the architecture around her. Curiosity about its structures and designs prompted her to photograph the world in a unique way.
Magalie began by capturing architectural details and structures, but soon her work evolved into a more conceptual and artistic form of photography. Her photographs were not only registrations of buildings, but also expressions of her unique view of the world.
She is working at the intersection of photography, architecture and sculptural collage. Through processes of fragmentation, repetition and spatial reconstruction, she investigates how architectural environments shape perception, memory and our experience of space.
Using her own architectural photographs as source material, Magalie deconstructs existing buildings and reconstructs them into layered, tactile compositions. By cutting, rearranging and physically manipulating photographic surfaces, she transforms architecture from a functional structure into an autonomous visual object.
Her work explores the tension between permanence and transformation, order and disruption, documentation and fiction. The resulting pieces occupy a space between photography, collage, relief and sculpture, inviting viewers to reconsider the built environment not as a fixed reality but as a mutable and subjective experience.
Artist Statement
My artistic practice originates from a fascination with architecture as a system of memory, perception and spatial experience.
When most people walk by, I stop. I am drawn to buildings that often remain unnoticed — not because they are spectacular, but because they reveal something to those willing to look closely. In my work, I search for symmetry in the everyday, abstraction in repetition, and the subtle interplay of light, materiality and space.
Working with my own photographs of contemporary architecture, I isolate, cut, layer and reconstruct architectural fragments. Through this process, the images gradually lose their documentary function and become autonomous compositions. Rather than representing architecture, I use it as raw material to investigate how space is experienced, remembered and transformed.
My recent body of work, YELLOWRED, takes its title from architectural drawings in which red indicates demolition and yellow renovation. I approach these colour codes not as technical annotations, but as a visual grammar of change. Architectural fragments are detached from their original context, reordered and reconstructed into layered compositions in which scale and perspective become unstable.
The acts of cutting and fragmenting are analytical gestures; the acts of assembling and reconstructing are restorative ones. By introducing physical depth and material presence into photography, I seek to create works that exist simultaneously as image, object and spatial experience, oscillating between recognition and abstraction.
Lives and works in Belgium
Media: Photography, sculptural collage, mixed media
Themes: Architecture, perception, spatial experience, reconstruction