In November, when everyone was home again, the gallery took up its Note from Home, a newsletter born out of the first confinement, to share portraits of our artists and their singular (and confined) universes. Today, following the successive cancellations of the fairs, the gallery makes the bet to redo, at 33 rue de Seine, a booth «at home» with the works of Pilar Albarracín, Julien Berthier and Alain Bublex: Paris Photo @Home!
In Pilar Albarracín’s work, photography is a real staging - even a show. It becomes the medium archiving and magnifying the performance, at the heart of her practice. The artist, main actress of her works, plays and diverts customs and symbols of her Andalusian culture in socially engaged and «burning» images.
Photography is also at the heart of the work of Julien Berthier. True actor of the gaze, he recently made his entrance among the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou with his additional Balcony, a sculpture accompanied by photographs showing it in situ. Julien Berthier likes to capture the perfect absurdity of the world in which we live, in Beckett’s manner or rather in his own way, with an exquisite sense of humor and a hint of delicacy, revealed in his latest series.
For Alain Bublex, it all starts with photography and travel. The artist, an assiduous spectator of the landscape and of Ted Kotcheff’s first opus of Rambo, initiated a long-term project in 2018: he creates a cartoon from «First Blood» in which the background - the American landscape - becomes the main character. The sequences of this fiction, redrawn with a graphic tablet and declined in prints with a melancholic atmosphere, contain the history of the American landscape from the 19th century to the 1970s, from the Hudson River School to the hyperrealists.
Opened in 1990 in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois has been able to bring together heritage and contemporary artists through large-scale exhibitions. The presentation of major works from New European Realism and American Hyperrealism alongside a vibrant contemporary artistic scene remains the hallmark of the gallery.
Since its inception the gallery has successively organised the first French solo shows of artists such as Alain Bublex (1992), Gilles Barbier (1995), Richard Jackson (2001), Pilar Albarracín (2008), Pierre Seinturier (2014), and more recently of Iranian duo Peybak (2015), and the artists Lucie Picandet and Zhenya Machneva in 2018.
This story is extended by the representation of avant-garde artists of the 1960s such as Tinguely, Villeglé, Stämpfli and Niki de Saint Phalle and that of American hyperrealists such as Robert Cottingham and John DeAndrea.
In 2016, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois has expanded and opened a second exhibition space at 33 rue de Seine, and continues to develop a major consulting and catalog publishing activity.