Pièces : Virginie Barré
The work by Virginie Barré (France, 1970) is influenced / feed by different contemporary cultural sources that she reinterprets as ready-mades, or echoing the cut and paste ethos, but in a conceptual way rather than procedural, so her executions are always meticulous, taking care both of the detail in her drawings and the detail in her sculptures and installations. Her sources are big generators of the most renowned popular symbols, being cinema and black series comic her favorites.
In the exhibition Pieces, her principal referent will be the graphic designer Saul Bass, especially in his work on the credits of the film “Anatomy of a Murder”. Virginie appropriates now the shapes that appear in the titles of Otto Preminger´s film, reinterpreting them, playing with them, and finally placing them on the walls painted yellow, blue and brown, spinning them on the wall so that all elements will be suspended, disarticulated.
She will also present her Homme a la womb chair, a sit mannequin on the famous uterus chair, dressed like a motorist and with a baby on his arms. In this installation some contrasts and semantic games are shown; masculinity dressed on leather with absolute feminity of the maternal sweetness, the rigidity of the dress and the safety helmet with the confort of the womb chair. It is all about creating doubt on the extremes, a dichotomical exploration that starts on a formal level, on a strong visual presence, to generate a deeper discourse.
Pieces is the title that brings discursive homogeneity to the whole exhibition. Pieces are the different works that Virginie is presenting, pieces are her cuttings from Saul Bass’ imaginary, pieces are the parts of her installations and sculptures, all them pieces that will be offered to the visitor, who will be able to play with his imagination to reconstruct as a game, with an almost dreamy tone to script of a new story. Virginie proposes the titles, the film can be written with infinity of possibilities starting on her pieces.
Virginie Barré is an internationally renowned artist, as it is evidenced by her presence in various biennales like Lyon Biennale (France), The Prague Biennale (Czech Republic) and in video festivals in Manila (Philippines) and Bangkok (Thailand). She has shown in institutions like The Swiss Institute (New York); Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art (Copenhague); The Nogaya Museum (Japan); Künstlerhaus (Hambourg) and in France, in CAPC of Bordeux, in the Museum of Arts and Industry of Saing-Etienne, in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and in Espace Paul Ricard (Paris). Her work is represented in important French public collections as FNAC/Centre Pompidou, Museum of Fine Arts of Bordeux and FRAC of Basse-Normandie in Caen.
