Agnès Geoffray

1973, French, Born in Saint-Chamond, France
Nominee - Prix Elysée 2015

Agnès Geoffray is a French artist, born in Saint-Chamond in 1973, currently living and working in Paris. She is a graduate of the Lyon and Paris national fine arts schools. Working with assemblage and collage techniques her work challenges our understanding of reality, and she fully exploits the storytelling potential of multiple representations of the truth within an image. Through her process, she reveals a complex universe of latent and mysterious tensions within a photograph.

Agnès Geoffray has held residencies in Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2002-2003) and the Villa Médicis, Rome (French Academy, 2010-2011). She has most recently exhibited at the Kunsthalle Mainz, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Magasin in Grenoble, the Centre de la photographie in Geneva and the Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France. Her works are in the public collections of the Fonds national d’art contemporain (Paris) and various private collections. Two books on her work have been published by La Lettre Volée: Ultieme Hallucinatie and Profond silence.

Website

Project

Métamorphoses

Agnès Geoffray searches in her work to test our eyes. By assembling and confronting heterogeneous elements within one single image, she perturbs our vision, engaging the viewer in a constant interrogation of the blurred lines between reality and fantasy. She is creating links: strange and distant connections.

“The project consists in assembling, confronting, even confusing two images in one same view. The aim is to provoke a circular way of looking in which the eyes escape, continue, insist, return… Establishing a movement in visibility that envelops a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges and dodges. This series implicitly questions the duality of seeing and looking. Seeing and its simulacrums, since where seeing ends, looking begins.

Like my other works, this new series proceeds from assemblage and collage, from collisions between fragile moments, from displacements that are as minute as they are evasive, from constantly evolving scenes in which everything appears in a state of suspension.

With this series, I am attempting to play with sight, create an endless back-and-forth between the represented scene and the revealed image, like an endless pursuit of reality. Establishing through the images a “co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world” (Roland Barthes), she is creating links: strange and distant connections.”