Valérie Favre
02 May - 07 Jun 2008
Valérie Favre
Honey in a Dead-End Street
02. May – 07. June 2008
Private View on Friday, 02. May, 6 – 9 pm
Markgrafenstr. 68, 10969 Berlin
The Galerie Barbara Thumm is pleased to present the Swiss artist Valérie Favre’s first solo exhibition in its new space. “Honig in der Sackgasse”
(Honey in a Dead-End Street) reflects the current condition of society in our globalized world. The sombre images mirror a mental state full of absurdity, sadness and helpless rage. Combined with parodistic elements – but also with a perceptive, virtually tender look at human fragility – this aggressive energy is what accounts for the impact of Favre’s paintings. The expressive large-scale work Kakerlake (Cockroach) represents a kind of key image which comprises and connects all of these different levels. The monstrous insect is repulsive and at the same time very sensitive – like honey in a dead-end street.
Kakerlake Nr. 1 (Cockroach No. 1) also marks the beginning of a new series. Valérie Favre consistently works with series and conceives of the canvas surface as the setting for a performance: her paintings are like a great narrative in which she picks up various strands and drops them again in a process carried out over many years.
The same applies to Redeskription Nr. 3, which offers a new description of Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross (1634). Here the painter exchanges the original pictorial characters for a group of faun and Majorettes (“Funkenmariechen”), the sexualized female counterpart to the soldier. The female figures have been shifted from the margins to the centre of the action and appear to be performing a joint choreography directed by the pictorial composition. On closer inspection, however, we see that their community is a malfunctioning one: like a pack of lone wolves, the figures turn away from Jesus in an allusion to the individualism of present-day society.
The protagonists in Autoscooter-Garage, on the other hand, have lost any and all individuality.
Whereas Favre’s Autos in der Nacht (Cars at Night) series (2000-06) depicted the car as a symbol of individual freedom, the auto scooters are entirely identical. The spatial composition creates a sense of collective anxiety: the viewer seems to be standing in the very midst of the confined, exitless shed before a fleet of vehicles swarming in insect-like manner.
Even the ceiling is occupied: banners hang from the rafters, making the scenario of uniformly adjusted scooter antennae all the more reminiscent of a military parade.
Favre’s works respond to the question as to how one’s relationship to art can be reconciled with one’s relationship to current world events. Every negative trend brought about by recession, famine and war is also present as a downward movement in her metaphorical pictorial motifs. The banners above the auto scooters hang down limply; the Majorettes take Christ’s corpse down from the cross and the cockroach hangs with its head downward. The same tendency is observed in the suicide series on which Valérie Favre has been working since 2003. The works appear disconcertingly light-footed and amusing: on these small canvases the artist collects means of self-destruction. Rarely has death been so central a theme in Valérie Favre’s oeuvre. Rather than radiating a sense of doom, however, the paintings appear electrified. They build up a kind of inner resistance, refuse to capitulate and remain full of empathy for their subject.
(Text: Maike Schultz)
Valérie Favre was born in 1959 in Evilard, Switzerland, and began her artistic career in Paris near the end of the 1980’s. She has been living and working in Berlin for the last ten years, where she took on a professorship at the Universität der Künste in 2006.
Honey in a Dead-End Street
02. May – 07. June 2008
Private View on Friday, 02. May, 6 – 9 pm
Markgrafenstr. 68, 10969 Berlin
The Galerie Barbara Thumm is pleased to present the Swiss artist Valérie Favre’s first solo exhibition in its new space. “Honig in der Sackgasse”
(Honey in a Dead-End Street) reflects the current condition of society in our globalized world. The sombre images mirror a mental state full of absurdity, sadness and helpless rage. Combined with parodistic elements – but also with a perceptive, virtually tender look at human fragility – this aggressive energy is what accounts for the impact of Favre’s paintings. The expressive large-scale work Kakerlake (Cockroach) represents a kind of key image which comprises and connects all of these different levels. The monstrous insect is repulsive and at the same time very sensitive – like honey in a dead-end street.
Kakerlake Nr. 1 (Cockroach No. 1) also marks the beginning of a new series. Valérie Favre consistently works with series and conceives of the canvas surface as the setting for a performance: her paintings are like a great narrative in which she picks up various strands and drops them again in a process carried out over many years.
The same applies to Redeskription Nr. 3, which offers a new description of Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross (1634). Here the painter exchanges the original pictorial characters for a group of faun and Majorettes (“Funkenmariechen”), the sexualized female counterpart to the soldier. The female figures have been shifted from the margins to the centre of the action and appear to be performing a joint choreography directed by the pictorial composition. On closer inspection, however, we see that their community is a malfunctioning one: like a pack of lone wolves, the figures turn away from Jesus in an allusion to the individualism of present-day society.
The protagonists in Autoscooter-Garage, on the other hand, have lost any and all individuality.
Whereas Favre’s Autos in der Nacht (Cars at Night) series (2000-06) depicted the car as a symbol of individual freedom, the auto scooters are entirely identical. The spatial composition creates a sense of collective anxiety: the viewer seems to be standing in the very midst of the confined, exitless shed before a fleet of vehicles swarming in insect-like manner.
Even the ceiling is occupied: banners hang from the rafters, making the scenario of uniformly adjusted scooter antennae all the more reminiscent of a military parade.
Favre’s works respond to the question as to how one’s relationship to art can be reconciled with one’s relationship to current world events. Every negative trend brought about by recession, famine and war is also present as a downward movement in her metaphorical pictorial motifs. The banners above the auto scooters hang down limply; the Majorettes take Christ’s corpse down from the cross and the cockroach hangs with its head downward. The same tendency is observed in the suicide series on which Valérie Favre has been working since 2003. The works appear disconcertingly light-footed and amusing: on these small canvases the artist collects means of self-destruction. Rarely has death been so central a theme in Valérie Favre’s oeuvre. Rather than radiating a sense of doom, however, the paintings appear electrified. They build up a kind of inner resistance, refuse to capitulate and remain full of empathy for their subject.
(Text: Maike Schultz)
Valérie Favre was born in 1959 in Evilard, Switzerland, and began her artistic career in Paris near the end of the 1980’s. She has been living and working in Berlin for the last ten years, where she took on a professorship at the Universität der Künste in 2006.