Valérie Belin. Le songe des idoles, Van der Grinten Galerie, Düsseldorf

This exhibition at the Van der Grinten Gallery is Valérie Belin’s first in Germany for over twenty years; a representative selection of fourteen photographs spanning the last 12 years offers an insight into the key aspects of her work.

The exhibition ‘Le songe des idoles’ is centered on images of individual women, a recurring theme in the oeuvre of Valérie Belin. For her, the woman – the eternal feminine – is the object of projection and stereotyping, bar none. From the comic book heroine to the pin-up, et al, Belin interprets the normative codes anew. For series such as ‘New Marilyns’ (2024), ‘Lady Stardust’ (2023), ‘Heroes’ (2022), ‘All Star’ (2016) and ‘China Girls’ (2018), from which we are showing works, she selects real agency models to photograph in studio stagings. These are faces of perfect beauty – mainly according to the canon of the 1950s/60s. Imper- sonal, mute and motionless – they offer the ideal surface upon which to project any fantasy.