Conceptual nominee

Farewell Mother is a series of photographs which explore Femininity and separation through the triad VIRGIN-WIFE-MOTHER. It is inspired by representations of women in classic iconography and in mythology. This series gives a vision of Femininity inspired by the women around me and the ways in which they thrive, in their bodies and through their stories.
The action is intimately set in the bedroom belonging to one of these women; a survivor of cervical cancer, she will never be able to give birth. Though physically absent from these images, her presence colors the room through her preciously accumulated objects. Calling on childhood, religion and beauty, they create a dreamlike tension between innocence, seduction and mysticism.
In this room, another woman: a nude, thick-maned madonna, with sharp claws and wild hair. Theatrically lit, she disturbs the rules of contemporary, mediatized femininity. The hair on her body are markers of her satisfied unity with it, of a journey beyond puberty. We are confronted with the strangeness of our contemporary conception of women’s bodies; we demand hairless child-women, forever young, forever virgin. I am happy to introduce these unusual, inspirational women, who form through their ways of being a reflection on contemporary femininity.

Pierre Barbrel was born in 1991. He works and lives in Paris.
His photographic artworks are inspired by the narrative traditions of religious art and draw their references from syncretic myths.
Barbrel has always been fascinated by myths, tales and legends, particularly by their emotional strength, their philosophical and psychoanalytical elaborations.
He creates ties between the genesis of folklore and his own experiences and from that he builds a personal mythology.

At the core of his research is the incarnation of the psyche through the body, its traces in multimedia, its shadow in the cloud expanding the existence beyond death. His work explores the identity of the digital photographic medium, building bridges between the structure of digital images, the architecture of pixels and the organization of matter.
He uses photography as sublimation, a fight against pain, against oblivion, against death.

Barbrel tackles paradoxical concomitance in the digital media: body intolerance, censorship, abusive condemnation of nudity and sexuality and outrageous disclosure of information and unwanted images.

Barbrel’s work was exhibited 6 years in a row at the Grand Palais for ART CAPITAL. It was awarded a bronze medal in 2014, silver in 2018 and gold in 2020.