Valerie Favre

VALERIE FAVRE (Evilard, Switzerland, 1959).
"Lapin. Univers", 2004.
Watercolor on cardboard.
Measurements: 26 x 18 cm; 37'8 x 29'8 cm (frame).
Valérie Favre left her family at a very young age, leaving Switzerland to travel first to Paris and then to Brussels, London and New York. In the eighties, she settled in Paris, investigating various means of artistic expression, including theater, to finally drift towards painting. Self-taught, his art combines admiration for the great masters of universal art and his own, very personal fantasy, creating a dreamy and magical world, sometimes born of his childhood memories and readings, others with a cruel or sensual aura, as in the case of his women with animal heads, as is the case of the one we now present. Very soon she achieved great recognition and began a fertile exhibition career, winning numerous awards and recognitions, such as the prize of the Fondation Irène Reymond (Lausanne) in 1994, the Salon de Montrouge (Paris), the following year or a scholarship at the Villa Waldberta (Munich) in 1996. In 1997 a retrospective was dedicated to him in three institutions: the Centre culturel suisse de Paris, the Galerie Nathalie Obadia and the CREDAC d'Ivry-sur-Seine. In 1998 he settled in Berlin, seeking a freedom of action that he lacked in Paris, precisely because of his critical and public success. In Berlin he came into contact with a new generation of painters, especially with Neo Rauch and his colleagues of the "New Leipzig School". In 2009 a major retrospective organized jointly by the Carré d'Art de Nîmes and the Kunstmuseum Lucerne is dedicated to him.