Marianne Berenhaut at Dvir Gallery

Artist: Marianne Berenhaut

Exhibition title: N’avez-vous pas ri?

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Paris, France

Date: September 1 – October 13, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery

Dvir Gallery is delighted to open the new season with a solo show of Marianne Berenhaut, ‘N’avez vous pas ri?’ which will be dedicated to three bodies of works: Poupées-Poubelles, Carnets-collages, Bits & Pieces.

In Marianne Berenhaut’s historical body of work Poupées-Poubelles, organs and limbs become disjointed and independent. The only material that holds them together, just barely, is the transparent fabric of women tights. These models are disjointed, twisted. Not body-machines: body-things, broken bodies. Berenhaut’s fascination of the waste-body, of the body that does not hold together, of the catch-all body, the bent body, struck, torn, filled with anything and anyone, fascination with the body triumphant over everything, body-belly, body without head, head within the body.

Looking at them I don’t feel upset. Mirror effect: I am it, pieces by pieces. I go out through every pore. I am crossed, invaded, dispossessed. And yet in this thin skin I grow, I am alive. » – Marianne Berenhaut

Carnet-Collages is an ongoing series of works that Berenhaut has been making in parallel to her sculptural practice. They can be considered a s sculptures on paper. Over time, this very intuitive and free activity has developed into a kind of ongoing haiku. Like keeping a diary, each page is its own universe going from funny to ridiculous, from sadness to joy.

Bits & Pieces is the latest series of work by Marianne Berenhaut, it functions as a gateway, an invitation to her universe, where the smallest bit could be transformed into a piece and where pieces are in the process of evolution. It is an ongoing regroupment which casts a line between her different chapters. One could identify the carnet collage, the fabrics of Vie privée and the contained disarray of Poupées-Poubelles. As such it is a comprehensive gaze into her ongoing practice.

The exhibition offers an intimate voyage where the past Poupées-poubelles, the ongoing Carnets-Collages and the ever-present future Bits & Pieces are intertwined to showcase the full spectrum of Marianne’s practice.

Marianne Berenhaut, Belgian-born (1934) artist has been gathering, curating, transforming objects found in her immediate surrounding creating powerful yet delicate sculptures and installations. Her work addresses longing, trauma, absence, and memory. Through her vast body of work, spanning through 60 years, Marianne Berenhaut has created a unique visual language.

Today, she divides her time between Brussels and London, constantly creating. Having graduated the Académie du Midi and Atelier de Moeschal in the sixties, she had various solo exhibitions in different art spaces and institutions like La Maison des Femmes (Brussels), Island (Brussels), Belgium Jewish Museum (Brussels), MAC’s Grand Hornu (Belgium) as well as in Isy Brachot Gallery (Brussels), and Nadja Vilenne Gallery (Liège). She has been part of several group exhibitions as in Maison Grégoire (Brussels), Gladstone Gallery (Brussels), Bureau des réalités (Brussels) and Carl Freedman Gallery (Margate, UK). In 2020 she had a solo exhibition in at M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) and a retrospective at CIAP (Genk) in 2021.

Marianne would like personally to thank each one of her son: Thomas & Serge Simon and her friend and poet Michel Kolenberg who digs up words with glee and who once again, for her exhibition found the right word. She would like to address her best regards and gratitude to Yotam for this great invitation and to Jean and Rachel who made this possible.