Switzerland

Valérie Favre

Germany

Berlin

Galerie Barbara Thumm

Painting

Interieur

Short Cuts (Les Deux Marats)

Valérie Favres paintings open up fresh narratives and conceptual perspectives, moving between figuration and abstraction. Her works are dominated by a fictional world made up of contrasts, contradictions, resistance and restlessness.

She works in an openly experimental manner, using a repertory informed by art history. Her demands of the medium are extensive; she is always engaged in a radical interrogation both painting and artistic work processes. Favre paints scenes developed over the course of several years in large series and work cycles. The exhibition “Intérieurs” traces some of these series back to their beginnings and shows an early group of works, painted when Favre first moved to Berlin, between 2000 and 2001. Many of her later motifs and compositions can be already found in the large scale paintings.

Favre explains: “‘Intérieurs’ is a series of paintings that I made when I came to Berlin in 1999. A large part of these works are key paintings. Exemplary paintings. It is a source that I promised myself I would return to one day. Possibly now is the right time to do so?

In the ‘Intérieurs’ series, there are motifs such as the tree and the deer, which I revisited a few years later in the ‘Forest’ series. The graphic representation of the female body also hints at the ‘Lapine Universe’ series. You can already see the edges of the canvases, which are left blank, similar to the series ‘At the Table’. The ‘Intérieurs’ also hint at the series ‘The Small Theatres of Life’ through their impressions of collages of shapes and different layers of composition.

The paintings in the ‘Intérieurs’ series mark a departure from my earlier series of paintings created over many years in Paris. (I lived and worked there since the early 1980s.) They include ‘Périmètre’ and ‘Robe Rouge’, among others. These paintings are explorations of my personal thought processes, my emotionality expressed in painting, in the face of the contemporary German and especially Berlin art scene, in which I have immersed myself with all my energy.

One of the paintings shown here, has already been exhibited in the show ‘Malkunst’ curated by Birgit Hoffmeister at the Mudima Foundation in Milan from November 6 to December 6, 2000.“

(Valérie Favre, October 2023)


Intérieurs

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