In response to an invitation from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux - which regularly invites a contemporary artist to take a personal look at its collections - Valérie Belin is presenting Les visions silencieuses, a major solo exhibition organised in partnership with Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris, Brussels).

The exhibition devoted to this artist (born in 1964), considered to be one of the most important of her generation and one of the rare representatives of plastic photography, also follows on from the exhibitions dedicated by the Musée des Beaux-Arts to women artists, from contemporary artist Suzanne Lafont in 2018 to Rosa Bonheur in 2022.

Bringing together around a hundred pieces covering the artist's entire body of work, from the late 1990s to the most recent series, including one that has never been shown before, the exhibition is spread across the two sites of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, highlighting the singular dimension of her work.

In the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, the exhibition brings together the artist's most emblematic series ( Dresses , Models II , Michael Jackson , Black Women , Mariées marocaines , Têtes couronnées , Still Life , Bouquets , Corbeilles de fruits , Intérieurs , Bodybuilders , etc.) plus the most recent ( Painted Ladies , Reflection , Modern Royals , All Star and Heroes ) and five previously unreleased works from the new series entitled Lady Stardust (2023).

The artist's many references to the history of art, through the genres of still life, portraiture, the nude and the cult of the body, provide a stimulating and original dialogue with the museum’s collections. In the two wings of the museum, eleven photographs converse with the painting collections. Focusing above all on the female portrait - the artist's favourite subject - the choice of these correspondences is based above all on formal relationships.

Valérie Belin blurs the lines between the real and the virtual, nature and artifice, inanimate objects and living beings, presence and absence, hyperrealism and metaphor. The artist likes to say that she doesn't make "photographs of objects" but "portraits of objects", seeing in them a "metaphor for the body crossed by light". Bodybuilders , with their battered and oiled bodies, are matched by the metal carcasses of Crashed Cars , while window Mannequins often seem more human than their fleshy counterparts.