Barbara Breitenfellner — Exposition monographique — CPIF — Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 2 → July 13, 2019

Barbara Breitenfellner’s exhibition — whose title is so long it is impossible to remember — is the result of research carried out in 2018 as part of a CPIF International Residency¹.

Barbara Breitenfellner dreams up her installations — literally — keeping a list of them in a nocturnal journal. Hers is not an exhaustive, analytical approach; she is only interested in those dreams related to art and exhibitions. Titles function as the starting point for a mise en scène designed to create a distancing effect, in which imagination and fantasy provide a series of cleverly orchestrated enigmas.

For this monographic exhibition, in addition to a vast selection of collages and graphic works, the artist is presenting an installation specially designed and conceived for the CPIF. Its inception lies in a dream that also provided the show with its strange and very long title.

Barbara Breitenfellner was born in 1969 in Kufstein (Austria) and lives and works in Berlin. After studying at Glasgow School of Art, she took part in numerous group and solo shows, mainly in Germany, Austria and France.

Her works can be found in public and private collections worldwide.

Breitenfellner’s collages, silkscreen prints and installations focus on the production of images inspired by the nocturnal notes that record her dreams. Rather than opting for a psychoanalytical perspective, she (re) constructs a part figurative, part abstract dreamlike world, in which she combines formal reduction and erotic suggestion, institutional critique and conceptual irony, whilst testing the borders between reality and imagination.

‘‘For the past seventeen years I have been writing down my art-related dreams, which I subsequently materialise in my installations. These short descriptions function as both instructions and titles of the works. Working in the continuation of other artists and writers whose work revolves around dream recollections, I use these protocols to create condensed and distorted, often absurd or ironic representations of art-making and exhibiting or being an artist.’’ says the artist.

¹ International residency 2018 in partnership with the Cité Internationale des Arts and the Institut Français.

An exhibition sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Paris and the Forum Culturel Autrichien Paris ; with the invaluable assistance of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. In partnership with Displays / EnsadLab.