Valérie Favre
23 Mar - 30 Apr 2010
© Valérie Favre
Selbstmorde/Suicides 1) Empedocle 2) Avec deux crayons 2008-2010 Oil on canvas 18 x 24 cm each set of 5 paintings
Selbstmorde/Suicides 1) Empedocle 2) Avec deux crayons 2008-2010 Oil on canvas 18 x 24 cm each set of 5 paintings
VALERIE FAVRE
“Y’a un truc qui masque l’horizon”
Opening March 20, 2010
March 23 – April 30, 2010
Wednesday through Saturday, 2 to 7 p.m.
For her most recent exhibition, Valérie Favre invites us to penetrate a more private world to discover an aspect of her work that is little known.
A series of roughly forty works on paper lay in display cases that extend along the walls of the gallery space. This presentation draws our attention to the recurrence of images, where a figure in one drawing can also be found in another. Collage, photocopy, and the recurrence of certain motifs create repetition, rhythm and density. These aspects of the presentation gradually weave together as in a narrative to create a kind of mise en scene.
Appearing as visions in dream, Valérie Favre’s drawings develop the artist’s favorite themes, including death, insects, hybrid beings, mythological or not.
The real and the imaginary mix and flirt in such a way as to seduce us into an alternative world, one that is both intimate and fantastic.
Valérie Favre creates each drawing, as a unit, in automatic gestures. These gestures give shape to different figures, some of which echo those of her paintings. The figures are then cut out and pasted, so to recreate different spaces within the piece of paper. The cutting and pasting of collage allows for the initial image to be wielded, controlled, substituted, and re-appropriated; the figures are separated, reunited, and even placed side by side: all decisions that gives each drawing as a unit a dimension of suspension, a shifting that highlights the intimate view into Valérie Favre’s alternative world.
Valérie Favre makes up stories and tells us these stories, gradually mixing in their sociopolitical influences: war, death, suffering, as well as a few well-known suicides mingling with hybrid creatures in quest of sex, both masculine and feminine. In this way, the series of works can be seen as a kind of index of the world’s fears and anxieties. Yet, as the artist treats these anxieties with the derisory irony of a piece of paper, she also imposes a distancing from them, a distance from which rises humor.
Valérie Favre was born in Evilard, Switzerland in 1959. She began her artistic career in Paris in the late 1980’s. She lives and works Berlin, where she teaches painting at the Universität der Künste (since 2006).
Recent solo shows: Musée d’art contemporain, Carré d’art, Nîmes; Kunstmuseum Luzern.
Upcoming exhibitions: K21, Düsseldorf.
“Y’a un truc qui masque l’horizon”
Opening March 20, 2010
March 23 – April 30, 2010
Wednesday through Saturday, 2 to 7 p.m.
For her most recent exhibition, Valérie Favre invites us to penetrate a more private world to discover an aspect of her work that is little known.
A series of roughly forty works on paper lay in display cases that extend along the walls of the gallery space. This presentation draws our attention to the recurrence of images, where a figure in one drawing can also be found in another. Collage, photocopy, and the recurrence of certain motifs create repetition, rhythm and density. These aspects of the presentation gradually weave together as in a narrative to create a kind of mise en scene.
Appearing as visions in dream, Valérie Favre’s drawings develop the artist’s favorite themes, including death, insects, hybrid beings, mythological or not.
The real and the imaginary mix and flirt in such a way as to seduce us into an alternative world, one that is both intimate and fantastic.
Valérie Favre creates each drawing, as a unit, in automatic gestures. These gestures give shape to different figures, some of which echo those of her paintings. The figures are then cut out and pasted, so to recreate different spaces within the piece of paper. The cutting and pasting of collage allows for the initial image to be wielded, controlled, substituted, and re-appropriated; the figures are separated, reunited, and even placed side by side: all decisions that gives each drawing as a unit a dimension of suspension, a shifting that highlights the intimate view into Valérie Favre’s alternative world.
Valérie Favre makes up stories and tells us these stories, gradually mixing in their sociopolitical influences: war, death, suffering, as well as a few well-known suicides mingling with hybrid creatures in quest of sex, both masculine and feminine. In this way, the series of works can be seen as a kind of index of the world’s fears and anxieties. Yet, as the artist treats these anxieties with the derisory irony of a piece of paper, she also imposes a distancing from them, a distance from which rises humor.
Valérie Favre was born in Evilard, Switzerland in 1959. She began her artistic career in Paris in the late 1980’s. She lives and works Berlin, where she teaches painting at the Universität der Künste (since 2006).
Recent solo shows: Musée d’art contemporain, Carré d’art, Nîmes; Kunstmuseum Luzern.
Upcoming exhibitions: K21, Düsseldorf.