Galerie Eric Mouchet is delighted to announce the exhibition Flow Lines, dedicated to the artist Christine Barbe, from 10 September to 17 October 2015.
Christine Barbe’s work is infinitely variable. The artist juggles with and produces videos, from which stem photographs, which in turn become installations. She enjoys creating links between her various experimental creations, whether they take the form of visual arts, videos or more traditional techniques like painting and drawing.
By playing with ambiguities and paradoxes, Christine Barbe develops a visual style in which confinement, rootlessness, being caught between two worlds, the very essence of cultural identity and a sense of place - sometimes imbued with the fantastical - all come together. Just like the links she creates between the different media she uses, the multiple levels on which her work can be read move seamlessly back and forth, merging into one, producing a hypnotic effect on the visitor.
Against a backdrop of imagery that is steeped in her memories of many travels, her works often strive to redraw the outer limits of an identity that is constantly changing, always in flux – in short, to make waves above the waterline. Placed in the heart of the installations’ devices the clean appearance of the artist provides a visual and audible performative dimension.
In the series Rêves de Rébellion (Dreams of rebellion), the artist makes a conscious decision to put herself front stage, tirelessly revealing a series of different states of being to the wider world, encompassing the strange, the counter-cultural, the agony in the ecstasy.
Christine Barbe was born in France in 1955. She went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble before attending the Centre Saint Charles at the Sorbonne University, where she studied visual art and the science of art and film studies.
After graduating, she travelled extensively, settling, in some cases for extended periods of time, in North Africa, the West Indies and Eastern Europe before spending around ten years in the United States.
Christine Barbe’s work has featured in many exhibitions right across the globe. These have included exhibitions in France at the Grenoble Museum of Modern Art, the Couvent des Cordeliers and the Coprim Foundation (Paris), the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan, the San José Institute of Contemporary Art in the USA, the Deutsch Foundation, Lausanne, Switzerland and the Palais de Raïssouni, Asilah (Morocco).
Her creations are to be found in numerous private collections in the USA, Japan and Europe, as well as in a number of museums and art foundations.