Valérie Belin (b 1964, Boulogne-Billancourt, France) lives and works in Paris.
The topics of illusion and artifice are themes Belin has explored throughout her career, and she has photographed a wide range of subjects in this vein including live models, masks, mannequin heads, and body builders.
Belin’s most recent series, Super Models, made its debut early in 2015 with her solo exhibition, Les images intranquilles (Unquiet Images) at Centre Pompidou in Paris. This image is one of six large-scale color photographs in the series, which presents images of mannequins superimposed with abstract vector graphics that Belin finds online and then manipulates and digitally layers into each photograph. The series reflects her ongoing interest in themes of beauty, artifice, and the contemporary image.
The combination of real and artificial images, objects, and colors, enhanced by digital and mechanical perfection, fuses together to produce a disconcerting dichotomy between the real and artificial.
