Stéphane Duroy - Stéphane Duroy

Exhibition from January 11 to March 1, 2024
Galerie VU’

Opening January 18, 2024 from 6:30 pm in the presence of the artist

Meet the artist and sign Stéphane Duroy‘s book Photo Poche

To coincide with the publication by Editions Actes Sud of his own Photo Poche, Galerie VU’ presents a retrospective exhibition of Stéphane Duroy’s work.

The conception of this book was an opportunity for the author to look back over his work, retaining only the photographs that make up its very substance.

Initially a press photographer with the Sipa agency, Stéphane Duroy gradually moved away from reportage. With an approach that is both documentary and conceptual, he set out to explore the relationship with history in twentieth-century Europe, marked by two world wars. His formal sobriety and rigor have always freed him from both the spectacular and the anecdotal.
His work is guided by an obsessive quest for identity and history in the battered Europe of the twentieth century, which led him to the United States to follow in the footsteps of European exiles. It thus comprises four major projects: England, Berlin, Eastern Europe and the USA.

In 2009, just when he thought he had pushed photography to its limits, he began to detach himself from it. He then embarked on a new working process, one of exhaustion. Using dozens of copies of his book Unknown, which he cuts out, tears, glues, paints and erases, he makes both the photographs and the book disappear, creating objects that are a new form of language. Today, he continues this research, experimenting with painting and keeping a daily diary since the start of the war in Ukraine.