Valérie Favre
Born in Evilard (CH) in 1959, Valérie Favre initially pursued a career as an actress in theatre and film before devoting herself to painting. She went on to become one of the most prominent artists of the 1990s, It was during this period that she left France to join the Berlin art scene, where she became a professor at Berlin's Akademie der Künste (UdK).
An adept of free figuration, the artist opens up new narrative and conceptual perspectives in her work. Interested in the relationship between fiction and reality, play and life, domination and powerlessness; opposites, resistance and anxiety are all constituent elements of Valérie Favre's thinking. Through her pictorial gaze, various protagonists are presented in spaces drawn and assembled by montage. This experimental work is accompanied by elements drawn from the history of art (allegories, symbols, etc.), as well as cinematographic references, forming a complex network of references. Acrobats, imaginary creatures, ghosts, mysterious symbols symbols, self-portraits and quotations: the viewer is invited to plunge into the pictorial space a narrative that plays itself out ad infinitum. Valérie Favre organises the space of her image, as in large-scale theatrical. The artist places the scenes of her drawings in frames. In the same way as her paintings, her drawings are organised into series executed over several years.
In 2015, the monographic exhibition "Valérie Favre, la première nuit du monde" at the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg, and the exhibition organised at the Kunsthalle van der Heydt in Wuppertal in 2016, truly established her work, underlining its importance in contemporary art. In 2017, a solo exhibition was devoted to her at the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Neuchâtel (MAHN), and in 2018, the Neue Gladbeck Galerie devoted a solo exhibition to her entitled "Le désir d'éternité, un arrangement". In 2019, Valérie Favre took part in a group exhibition at the Deutscher Bundestag celebrating 100 years of voting rights for German women, and took part in Bergen Assembly, the Bergen triennial in Norway. In 2020, the artist has participated in two major exhibitions at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2020) and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover (2020). Valérie Favre has had numerous solo and group exhibitions and group exhibitions since the 90s, such as: "La Reine Malerei", Kunsthaus Dresden (1998) ; "Operette", Kunstverein Ulm (2008) ; "Visions", exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Lucerne, as well as at the Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nîmes (2009) ; "Art Kabinett", Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami (2011); "Selbstmord / Suicide", Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2013); "Valérie Favre", Musée d'art et d'histoire, Neuchâtel (2017); "100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht, 19+1 Künstlerinnen", Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin (2019) ; "Actually, the Dead are not Dead", Bergen Assembly, Norway (2019) ; "Actually, the Dead are not Dead", Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2020) ; "How to survive", Sprengel Museum, Hannover, (2020) ; "Valery / Plattform I / Exil", Galerie Pankow, Berlin (2020) ; "Le martyre de la main gauche", Kulturhaus Helferei, Zurich (2021) ; "Bateaux des poètes", Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Zurich (2021).
