Artwork comprises 24 canvases, each measuring 11.81 x 15.75 inches (30 x 40 cm).
In Valérie Favre's melancholy, phantasmagorical "Auto dans la nuit" (Car in the Night) series, the artist depicts automobiles poised in precarious or desolate scenarios, their windows blanked out so that no passengers are visible. In each successive canvas of the series, the car accrues symbolic weight, embodying an oblique commentary on solitude and risk as it appears in contexts ranging from a city street to the heart of a forest. Fantastical figures, rare swathes of bright color, and unsettling compositions all serve to skew the viewer's sense of reality, and assert the series's basis in a totalizing subjectivity.
Valérie Favre (b. 1959) is a Berlin-based Swiss painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. After an early career as a film and stage actress, Favre began to focus on making visual art. Often romantic or gently whimsical, Favre’s impressionistic paintings feature motifs borrowed from fairy tales and mythology. Her works on paper, while similarly fantastical in subject matter, tend to be more intricate and rigorously architectural in their composition. Favre tends to paint in series. She also makes sculptures from ceramic and found materials. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France (1995, 2000, 2002, 2005); the Musée de Picardie, Amiens, France (1997); the Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany (1998); the Institut Français de Berlin, Germany (1999); the Palais des Arts, Toulouse, France (2000); the Centro del Arte Salamanca, Spain (2003); Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Germany (2008, 2011); the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France (2010); the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2010); and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, France (2010, 2012). She lives and works in Berlin.
Selected Public Collections:
Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France
Fonds Municipal de le Ville de Paris, France
Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, Île-de-France, France
Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland
Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine, France
Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
