Hélène Girod de l'Ain was a postwar French abstract painter and mixed-media artist whose collages and paintings, built from paper, fabric, wood, and metal, placed her within the Parisian informel and lyrical-abstraction traditions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Hélène Girod de l'Ain (born Hélène Golendorf, 1926–1989) was a French painter, draftsman, and collagist born in Paris. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris and began her career as a graphic designer for several Parisian magazines before committing herself fully to painting. Her mature work consisted of abstract paintings on canvas and mixed-media collages incorporating paper, fabric, wood, and metal, works that situated her within the postwar Parisian abstract tradition opened by the informel and lyrical-abstraction painters of the 1940s and 1950s.
She exhibited at the Jeanne Bucher gallery in Paris in 1965, one of the most important venues for abstract art in postwar France, and at the Centre Pompidou in 1983. Her paintings and collages are held in the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, including works titled Place de Tarquinia and Fillette, and have circulated through major French and international auction houses since her death.