Valérie Favre: Hello Bambi

With "Hello Bambi", Valérie Favre returns to Paris where she has not exhibited for five years. Her exhibition in 2003 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Amiens was very well received.
Valérie Favre has lived in Berlin since 1998. In 2004 she participated in several exhibitions in Germany: Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster, "Made in Berlin" at Art Forum Berlin, Galerie Wohnmaschine in Berlin.
At Galerie Nathalie Obadia , the exhibition "Hello Bambi" brings together several aspects of her recent work.

"The Third Unknown Grimm Brother" is the title of a series of three large triptychs begun in 2004. The second triptych, "Domination" (250 x 450 cm), is the focal point of the exhibition at the gallery. It is a narrative in images, a sort of lost paradise, representing a staging in a landscape-theater where each surface, brushstrokes, vanishing line have roles as important as the figures we think we recognize. We discover on the same plane a birth, a pony, a gust of wind in the branches of a willow, a centaur rolling in the grass, and on another plane, the memory of "L'île au mort" by Arnold Böcklin (painted in 1883).

Valérie Favre is not in a logic of stylistic exclusivity. In her approach, she brings together several ways of painting, of working with materials, of thinking about space and color, of organizing iconographic systems and narrative strategies. If our era wanted to believe at one time that "everything was already done" in painting, Valérie Favre affirms in each exhibition that nothing is determined, that painting remains an opening, a great project: in each painting, in the stakes between the paintings, in the space between the exhibitions.

In 1999 the "Rabbit Universe" appeared in the artist's work and since then, this half-woman, half-rabbit figure wearing a shirt and boots, has become important in the painted settings. It has become a fixed character in the mythology of Valerie Favre's work. At the Nathalie Obadia Gallery, a series of new large oil paintings on paper will be presented: "Die Idiotinnen" (The Idiots). Here the Lapines Universe represent variations on the theme of the body. Painted in the material of oil paint, they are immobilized in spontaneous attitudes. The "Rabbit Universe" can represent the animal part in us, but it is also a being of fantasy like a Lara Croft who would have grown a little, a personal logo, untenable under the brush.

This summer, Valérie Favre will participate in the exhibition on German painting that will take place at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes, curated by Françoise Cohen.