Bajac Quentin, Dork Zabunyan, Hatte Étienne, Valérie Belin, Bologna, Damiani, 2016
→Cheroux Clément, Dryansky Larisa, Marcoci Roxana (ed.), Valérie Belin: The Unquiet Images, exh. cat., musée national d’Art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris (24 June–14 September 2015), Paris, Dilecta / Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2015
→Valérie Belin, exh. cat., Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2007–2009), Göttingen, Steidl, 2007
Valérie Belin, les images intranquilles, Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, 24 June–14 September 2015
→Valérie Belin, Édouard Manet, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 8 October 2008–1 February 2009
→Valérie Belin, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, 2007–2009
French Photographer and Visual artist.
Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Bourges, Valérie Belin was influenced by the American minimalism that she studied in her philosophy of art classes at the Sorbonne, where she graduated in 1988. Working primarily with light, she invented a specific photographic process in 1993. Her series of large format prints, mostly in black and white, presented objects or people in a single theme from the same font angle, framed in the same neutral way; thus de-contextualized and de-individualized, the subjects of her work appear as a sort of specimens—between luminous specters and tangible objects, expressiveness and withdrawal, reality and potentiality—under the impassive eye of a process which tends towards abstraction. Her first attempts were with objects in Cristal (1993), then Argenterie (1994). Her Robes vénitiennes (Venetian dresses, 1996) stretched out in coffins, formed figures with the appearance of substance, but whose flatness suggested the absence of the body they should have clothed; the sumptuous material lead chillingly to emptiness.