Opening on Tuesday January 28 from 6 pm to 9 pm
Exhibition January 29 – March 7, 2020
Xippas Geneva is pleased to present In rare cases, local hero with pompadour, a solo exhibition by the Austrian artist Marina Faust.
Marina Faust’s collages are portraits of women and men, an exhortation to produce “beings” without complying to conventional criteria of stereotypical beauty. Faust gives them a completely different treatment, tearing those portraits, not respecting the conventions of their completeness with facial elements to be stuck on, tearing again, altering the backgrounds, photographing the results and then tearing again, involving herself in as many operations as are necessary to keep the idea of a “perfect being” at bay.*
“My collages are the results of experiments with and around photography. I tear apart, destroy and rebuild. Accidents settle the method. In a tradition of self-portrait, a discipline that I have practiced my whole life, we could see these collages as self- portraits – but also quite simply portraits of my contemporaries. ”
At the core of Marina Faust’s practice has always been photography – she has developed a radical and unusual approach to exhibition photography – and the photographic interpretation of the body in particular, evidently in her uninterrupted collaboration with Martin Margiela for some twenty years, but also in her publishing activity for various magazines, and also in her personal work which led her, notably, to do many portraits and also many self- portraits. It is in fact the body that links all these activities together.*
In spite of their severe deconstruction, and probably also because of it, Marina Faust’s portraits each have a special identity and attain that “character” quality without which the portrait does not add up too much.*
Marina Faust is an artist who lives and works in Paris and Vienna. She began by reporting in Vienna, then collaborated in the 1970s with the agency Magnum in Paris. She showed her work at the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris in the 1980s. In 1995, she extended her artistic practice to other disciplines by creating a series of autobiographical videos. Her work today includes videos, objects, photographs and collages.
*Eric Troncy, It’s only you, Le Contortium, Dijon, 2017
