Valérie Favre: Le désir d’éternité, un arrangement

Neue Galerie, Gladbeck, Germany

Overview
Installation view, Valérie Favre: Le désir d’éternité, un arrangement, Neue Galerie, Gladbeck, Germany, 2018
Installation view, Valérie Favre: Le désir d’éternité, un arrangement, Neue Galerie, Gladbeck, Germany, 2018

The Neue Galerie Gladbeck presents with Valérie Favre an outstanding position of Swiss contemporary art. The focus of her visual language is also now the comédie tragédie of human existence graspable in myths, here now saturated by literature, philosophy, film and art history.

Constitutive for the new paintings is an interior that is somewhere between a banquet hall and a doll's house and, in the gestural impasto on the one hand and the bright white of the coloration on the other, conveys absence and presence as well as silence and communicative solemnity at the same time. Thus one could think of a table party in the Strindbergian sense.
 
Inspired by the painting "Letzte Generalversammlung der Eidgenössischen Bankanstalt" (1966, Centre Dürrenmatt, Neuchâtel) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who was based in Valérie Favre's hometown of Neuchâtel, she refers here to central positions of early 20th century art and cites, from time to time, the painting and symbolism of Pierre Bonnard and James Ensor, but also of Odilon Redon, in order to negotiate her contemporary questions. Painting is for Valérie Favre, who also works in the fields of sculpture and drawing, a sensual medium and method of conceptual encirclement of her questions.
 
Installation Views
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