Beatrice Valentine Amrhein — NextLevel Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 1, 2011 → February 25, 2012

Magic Lantern, la prossima luce

NextLevel Galerie presen the first large-scale, solo exhibition in France by Béatrice Valentine Amrhein.

The work of Beatrice Valentine Amrhein is multifaceted. After painting, she explores other media: drawing, photography, sculpture and new media. She was one of the first artists to use the mobile phone to create video works, most notably for the Videos lustre. Her artistic approach is built on the theme of the body and explores human relationships in the era of new technologies. With international recognition, she returns to France with a luminous exhibition, where drawing and sculpture work as a vehicle for her “elaborations” and transport us into a work that is both dense and poetic. In dialogue with the drawings is a sculptural installation of laboratory glassware, re-appropriated by the artist, accompanied by a video. The hypnotic cadence of images and pictorial texture acts as an indicator of the artists process of elaboration.

“Remember your magic lantern! Its warm and captivating light at nightfall is so conducive to dreams with its whirling luminous projection that animals transform into constellations. The fluorescent stars on the ceiling vibrate beneath its strobe lights, calling the magic of dreams into the depths of sleep. Update your Memory Card to keep this souvenir alive and you hold then the passwords to enter the world of Magic Lantern, la prossima luce, a visual manifesto in eight chapters, presenting the artist’s recent drawings. (…) She recreates her laboratory in a new dimension, a field of her dreams, the territory of her trances and her elaborations. Her visual vocabulary, a language outlined and scattered throughout her artworks, all of a sudden stifles in the sheet of the paper and needs to break free from those constraints. This language gets a new translation into a “manifesto”, a new visual theory. No constraints anymore! The sheets gradually multiply to form books, chapters of ten drawings each. These books will be exhibited at the gallery in their original form to be dismantled into a series of drawings that, once they are hung, will form an endlessly flexible large-format piece of artwork for the collector. (…)”

Extract from text by Sophie Cavaliero author of the book «Nouvelle Garde», Ed. du Lézard Noir, 2011.