Valérie Favre

Favre understands painting to be its own language, and it is the disruption that happens at the point of translation from idea to form that drives her artistic practice. She paints without preliminary sketches. She lays out her setting and then puts in the individual figures, which she is constantly correcting. The great narrative power and aura of her paintings result from its teeming composition, its imaginative richness and expressive treatment of the paint (colours, drips, impasto, accidents).

Valérie Favre (born in 1959, Neuchâtel Switzerland, lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Neuchâtel, Switzeralnd), initially pursued a career in theater after completing her training in the early 1980s, before fully dedicating herself to painting. Since 1998, she has been teaching painting at the UDK University of the Arts in Berlin.

At the centre of Favre's imagery is the tragicomedy of the human existence, graspable in myths, literature, philosophy, film or art history. She often paints in series, in an effort to capture the process of the temporal and to become intimate with her subjects and motifs. Favre's paintings open up narratives and conceptual perspectives, moving between figuration and abstraction. She makes references to central positions of early twentieth-century art quoting specific paintings and the symbolism of artists such as Pierre Bonnard, James Ensor or Giorgio de Chirico, but also works by Goya in a way to negotiate contemporary issues. Painting is for Favre a sensory medium and a method of conceptually addressing questions that are crucial and necessary in our society.

Her well-known series "Selbstmord. Suicide" (2003-2013) was first shown in its totality in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in 2013. The series consists of 129 small format paintings reduced in color shades representing the self-chosen death, partly based on actual facts, partly fiction. The starting point for the works is the very moment of the radical decision to end one’s life, and the self-dramatization of the moment of death.

The series "Théâtres" that she begun in 2007 consists of large scale paintings and also hold an important significance in Favre's oeuvre. In it, the artist lays out figures such as dancers, acrobats, animals, skeletons and the like that recall the motif of the dance of death. The curtains and lamps tell us that they are on a stage. Favre heightens this sense of uncertainty by having her "Théâtres"-paintings hung relatively low in order to better embrace the world around them. She thus opens up a frontal narrative about the darkness and beauty of humanity, about the tragedy and comedy of all life. In her own words ‘the madness of the world’.

Favre's latest series “Bateau des poètes” is in keeping with her previous work. Thought of as a homage, the series brings together on small boats, sailing in the darkness of the night, the great literary figures who shaped Favre's life and practice. The series refers as much to intellectual journeys as it does to migration or the last voyage. While some of the paintings feel abstract, others are more figurative. By means of collage, one can see on the vessels the bright faces of the poets Sylvia Plath and Georg Trackl but also the artists Ana Mendieta and Diane Arbus, to name a few. “Bateau des poètes” was shown for the first time in a group exhibition at the Sprengel Museum Hannover in 2020.

in 2024 Valérie Favre has won the Prix Meret Oppenheim and will have a solo exhibition at our gallery in Rämistrasse opening on August 30. In 2012, she was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in France and her work has been on view at the Sprengel Museum Hannover (2020), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (2018), Musée d’art Neuchâtel (2017), Von der Heydt Kunsthalle Wuppertal-Barmen (2016/2017), Franz Gertsch Museum, Burgdorf (2016), Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg (2015), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2013), K21 Düsseldorf (2010/2011), Kunstmuseum Luzern (2009/2010), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009), Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2008), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2006), and Musée de Picardie, Amiens (2004) to name a few.

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