Who is this woman who the Belgian artist Katrien de Blauwer mysteriously presents to us? A series of photographs gives us some keys without revealing the details.
Often described as a “photographer without camera”, Katrien de Blauwer (Belgium, 1969) focuses her practice on collage. The process is spontaneous and responds to the plastic artist’s fascination with the construction of images. In her work, there is always the question of the female figure whose yellowed surface of magazine pages testifies to a bygone era. The artist cuts out, sets up the published photograph, glues it, sometimes adds a trace of paint. A narrative is set up from this raw material, from old magazines whose artist recycles certain images. It is through these iconographic fragments that the artist’s intimate thought is revealed. Katrien de Blauwer shows his fascination for these glossy beings. It retains body fragments, but no faces or looks, thus leaving us all the freedom of interpretation.
At the invitation of the MBAL, the artist developed two parallel stories, where two moments of life are revealed. There is a question of female seduction, there is a barely sketched male figure. The artist seeks to place us in this masculine gaze. There is something disturbing about these scenes, an impression of voyeurism, an atmosphere that seems to come out of a black film or the New Wave cinema. At Katrien de Blauwer, photography from magazines found at flea markets is reinvented like a surface welcoming new stories. The female characters are revealed while being elusive.
Katrien de Blauwer : Isabelle à 24 ans… Isabelle à 42 ans…
02.15.20−06.01.20
Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle
Marie-Anne-Calame 6
CH-2400 Le Locle
