Valérie Collart explores the relationship between sculpture and photography in her work. She reflects on the penetrability of those two media by experimenting with their boundaries. The ambivalence of this artistic practise raises the question of whether Valérie Collart’s work is image or object-based.

An Image Frozen in Time

Valérie Collart’s photogravure series ‘Ruins’ represents a material meeting between the two-dimensionality of photo documentation and the three-dimensionality of the object. Conditioned by the size of her studio Valérie Collart produced a series of small-format objects, with the only purpose of making them a subject of her photographic work.

By transforming the digital photo files into large-format photogravures Valérie Collart has used the media of fine art printmaking to evoke the cultural memory of early new world monumentality in us. Valérie Collart’s work is part of the postmodern fascination with the archaic. It uses the digital virtuality to reconstruct the figurative there where the figure and the substance seem to disappear. The artist’s pseudo-archaic pillars, is, on the one hand, a reference to the past and yet at the same time, it represents the energy of transformation visualizing to us what is to come in the future.

Valérie Collart, born 1981, Bordeaux, France. Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

She received an MFA from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson, Nice (FR). Valérie Collart’s recent exhibitions include The Beauty & The Uncanny, Tranen, Hellerup (DK), Parts & Wholeness, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (DK). Her work is included in the collection of The Danish Arts Foundation.

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While Valérie Collart's work suggests an interest in the archaic Nicolai Howalt's photo etching series Herbarium looks like a trace of past geological times.