Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
In her art, Marianne Berenhaut gives us a unique perspective on the world through the critical lens of a woman who as a child, together with her twin brother, grew up hidden away in a Catholic orphanage during the Shoah. Her work speaks of the harm, the damage and the scars that remain as a tracery through society: the marks of longing and loss, disquieting absurdity and trauma, unbidden hilarity and memory.
In the 1960s she graduated at the Académie du Midi and Atelier of Jacques Moeschal (1913-2004) in Brussels. Her inimitable visual language, in which creation and survival are intricately entwined, is first evident in her sculptural constructions of plaster and wire, made as if attempting to heal the household void left by the wounds of war: Maisons-Sculptures (1964-1969). Of this series only archival photographs survive. The Poupées-Poubelles (1970-1979; and ongoing) follow, made of remnants of soft discarded fabrics and materials, making them sensual. They very much remind us of the fragmented body as in Melanie Klein’s theory of the part-object, a conception further developed by Donald Winnicott as the transitional object. In her landmark work, the Poupées-Poubelles form a highly significant sculptural group of haphazardly assembled, stuffed “trash dolls” whose unruly organs and limp limbs are disjointed. Holding the figures together, just about, is the gossamer filament of pantyhose, a perfectly ambiguous material for feminist artists. Notably, once 49 dolls, seated on chairs, were installed in the church of Saint-Loup in Namur (2008). These models like worn-out cuddles are deformed and twisted: thing-bodies, padded and damaged bodies.
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