ART CITIES: Paris-Marina Faust

Marina Faust began her artistic career as a photo-reporter in Vienna. Her first exhibitions took place at Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris in the 1980s. In 1995, she expanded her artistic practice onto other disciplines such as video, objects, installations and collages.  In 2019 Marina Faust was awarded the Otto Breicha Award for Artistic Photography in Austria, which led to a solo exhibition at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in 2020.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Xippas Gallery Archive

Marina Faust. in her solo exhibition “In The Effort To Keep Day And Night Together” brings together, the series of portraits “Faces”, as well as her “Rolling Stools” and “Traveling Chairs”. With the “Faces” series, Marina Faust develops portraits originating from a children’s game supposed to create perfect beings. The artist diverts the intention of the game, and the resulting creatures or “instantaneous states of mind,” challenge our perception of painting, from cubism to trompe-l’oeil. The technique of pigment print on semi-transparent silk tissue paper generates a complexity between collage, photography, painting and drawing, and merge both analog and digital elements. As the artist says “My collages are the results of experiments with and around photography. I tear, destroy and reconstruct. Accidents govern the method. In a tradition of self-portrait, a discipline I have practiced my whole life, one could see these collages as self-portraits, but also simply as portraits of my contemporaries. Despite their severe deconstruction, and probably also because of it, Marina Faust’s portraits each have a unique identity and achieve the quality of a ‘character’ without which a portrait is nothing much”. In 2003, Marina Faust created her first “Traveling Chairs” for her film “Gallerande”. Vintage chairs were transformed and equipped with stabilizing structures of multiple wheels for the traveling shots. New groups of Traveling Chairs are used today to scroll through exhibition spaces. People can push each other which creates a special bond between the two individuals and offers a different perception of time and perspective on the surrounding world. The “Rolling Stools” come from boudoir vintage stools and are also stabilized and elevated with multiple industrial wheel structures. Besides the fact to sit on them they can be seen as utopian creatures or dystopian pets.

Photo Left: Marina Faust, Queen of hearts, 2022, Pigment print on silk tissue paper on matt paper, 122 x 90 x 3,5 cm, © Marina Faust, Courtesy the artist and Xippas Gallery. Right: Marina Faust, In disposition to remain in comfortable preconceptions, 2019, Pigment print on silk tissue paper on matt paper, 122 x 90 x 3,5 cm, © Marina Faust, Courtesy the artist and Xippas Gallery

Info: Xippas Gallery, 108 rue Vieille-du-Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 9/9-14/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://www.xippas.com/