Valérie Mannaerts

 

A sculptor as much as a painter, Valérie Mannaerts (b. 1974 in Belgium, where she lives and works) has developed a personal language characterized by her fascination with the real and the surreal. Her oeuvre, which unites the strength of drawing and sculpting, moves between the second and third dimensions.


She explores the physiognomic qualities of things, questioning the relation between organic and inorganic forms, the presence and autonomy of objects, and inquiring into the sedimented histories inscribed in them. Availing herself of a diversity of materials, Mannaerts creates hybrid, contradictory and precarious forms that are simultaneously open to chance and formally circumscribed. Her work dwells in the borderline between image and object, in ways that are reminiscent of surrealist and, later, feminist preoccupations with material and image culture, corporeality and states of consciousness.