Valérie Belin, born in 1964, lives and works in Paris. She has held numerous solo exhibitions across Europe, the US and Japan and her work is held in collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Bibliothéque nationale de France, Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the CCF Foundation for Photography, Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others. Widely published, Belin won the Paris Photo prize in 1997, The CCF (HSBC) Foundation for Photography Prize in 2000 and was short-listed for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2004. Solo exhibitions include the Huis Marseille Foundation, Amsterdam (2007), the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne (2008) and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2008).? Made-up, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, USA (2009). Sikkema Jenkins & Co Gallery, New York, USA (2010).
Michael Hoppen has previously shown two solo shows of Valérie Belin’s work Palette and Chips, 2006 and Valérie Belin 2007. This year Michael Hoppen is proud to present ‘Yohoho’ opening 31st of May 2012..
Valérie Belin’s Photographs of banal items are coldly beautiful, confrontational and achieve an unsettling balance of being both abstract and representational. Each of the series are vastly different in subject matter but are joined by Valérie’s signature style; The pin sharp precision of a pen and ink drawing and depriving the subject of its context by means of a black backround or in the case of her new series Yohoho , the absence of the human figure and the layering of two negatives.
“In my first series, and especially those dedicated to crystal vases and glasses (1993), I worked only on the light spectrum of the objects and remained very close to the primary process of photography. However, in my later work, whether colour or black-and-white, the new technologies have given me the option of using a freer, more pictorial, dreamlike treatment of the subject - for example, in the pictures of the magicians, of the dancer at the Lido and of the baskets of fruit (2007). Modern tools have led me to see photography beyond the analogue, as a means of creating a pure image captured directly by me at the very heart of my models. Much more than a figurative medium, photography offers me
the possibility of probing the evanescent frontiers between reality and illusion, to reveal the profound supernaturalism of my work.”