Stéphane Duroy — Stéphane Duroy

Galerie VU’
58, rue Saint-Lazare – 75009 Paris
From the 3rd of March to the 31th May, 2019

On the occasion of the publication of the book Rencontres avec Stéphane Duroy by Sophie Bernard, in the collection Paroles de photographe at Filigranes Éditions, Galerie VU’ invites Stéphane Duroy to present a selection of his works.

Echoing this interview-manifesto, the exhibition shows an ensemble chosen by the author, embracing his forty-five-year career: his relationship to History and the world of today and his relationship to photography, with which he has been distancing himself for the past ten years.

With his restless and silent photographs, of great sobriety, from L’Europe du Silence to Unknown, Stéphane Duroy has inscribed in four major projects on England, Berlin, Eastern Europe and the United States, an obsessive work about the quest for identity and history in the battered Europe of the twentieth century that will lead him to the United States in the footsteps of European exiles.

If the book has always been essential in the author’s approach, in 2009 he begins to detach himself from photography, which he seems to have pushed to its limits to the point of overcoming it, and begins a new process of work, one of exhaustion, too. From dozens of copies of his book Unknown, which he cuts, tears, glues, paints, erases, he makes photographs disappear like the book and creates objects that are a new form of language. Today he continues this research, notably by experimenting with painting.

The exhibition presented by Galerie VU’ shows the evolution of a demanding career that goes beyond photography to find new mediums of expression and exploration.