“The imagination is a mixer.” Some thoughts on the work of Vincent Barré and why his work must be shown in Bremen
The review in the Canadian Journal ETC covering the Vincent Barré exhibition at Galerie Bernard Jordan in Paris in 2004 was notably entitled: “De la sculpture par definition”. The reviewer’s starting point was the renewed interest, which she had observed in many artists since the turn of the millennium, in the possibilities of the old media. In the case of sculpture, it entailed harking back to the sculptural body, as the writer went on to elucidate with examples of Barré’s works. By quoting Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in this context, she made reference to the beginnings of modern sculpture in the 19th century. Rather than sculpture in the “expanded field”, in the famous phrase chosen by Rosalind Krauss for her history of the medium after 1960, Barré seems to rank among the artists who seek the centre of sculpture: the object formed by a human being, with a spatial order comprehensible to other human beings. The relevance of his work hinges upon this. At the same time, when the œuvre is considered from an art-historical viewpoint, limitations come into play because today’s terminology is oriented more towards the expanded field and is diverging ever further from there.
“The imagination is a mixer.” Some thoughts on the work of Vincent Barré and why his work must be shown in Bremen
The review in the Canadian Journal ETC covering the Vincent Barré exhibition at Galerie Bernard Jordan in Paris in 2004 was notably entitled: “De la sculpture par definition”. The reviewer’s starting point was the renewed interest, which she had observed in many artists since the turn of the millennium, in the possibilities of the old media. In the case of sculpture, it entailed harking back to the sculptural body, as the writer went on to elucidate with examples of Barré’s works. By quoting Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in this context, she made reference to the beginnings of modern sculpture in the 19th century. Rather than sculpture in the “expanded field”, in the famous phrase chosen by Rosalind Krauss for her history of the medium after 1960, Barré seems to rank among the artists who seek the centre of sculpture: the object formed by a human being, with a spatial order comprehensible to other human beings. The relevance of his work hinges upon this. At the same time, when the œuvre is considered from an art-historical viewpoint, limitations come into play because today’s terminology is oriented more towards the expanded field and is diverging ever further from there.