The Stranger, from the series All Star, 2016. © Valérie Belin, courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery
We revel in the splendour of surfaces, rarely delving below them and often mistaking the appearance of things for their inner truth. With an unmistakable understanding of the pleasures of sight, French photographer Valérie Belin gives us what we want while simultaneously examining the intersections between identity and artifice with a luxurious exploration of the feminine in her large-scale artworks.
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Belin’s gift lies in her ability to make us question the nature of our desires. Taking the notion of gender as a construct to the logical extreme, she photographs mannequins and models alike in a manner that simultaneously embraces and deconstructs our stereotypes.
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“What I am trying to express in my work is related to my status as a woman, in a humble way. It doesn’t have a militant aesthetic nor a political discourse,” Belin says. She does just this in her eponymous exhibition, opening February 21 at Huxley-Parlour, London, which features 15 works from the series Transsexuals, Mannequins, Brides, Super Models, All Star, and Painted Ladies, made between 2001 and 2017. Here, Belin speaks about the power of images to shape our beliefs about what “female” means.
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Brides_XXX, from the series Brides, 2012. © Valérie Belin, courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery