Valérie Belin

 Valérie Belin is a Paris-based artist whose photographs interrogate how identity, beauty, and power are constructed through images. Working at the intersection of photography, mass media, and art history, Belin examines the surfaces through which femininity and subjectivity are staged, idealized, and consumed. Her work consistently explores the tension between illusion and materiality, revealing how photographic images both fabricate and stabilize social meaning.

Since the 1990s, Belin has developed a rigorous, serial practice grounded in appropriation, stylization, and artifice. Her major bodies of work include Mannequins (2003), Black Eyed Susan (2010–), Super Models (2015), All Star (2016), Painted Ladies (2017), and Heroes (2023). Across these series, Belin produces portraits of female figures that operate on both a physical and psychological level, isolating familiar archetypes and holding them in sustained visual focus. Faces and bodies are rendered hyper-polished, flattened, or anonymized, pushing photography toward a sculptural, almost synthetic presence that questions how femininity is constructed, consumed, and naturalized through images.

Her recent series New Marilyns (2024) and Cover Girls (2025) extend these concerns through portraits realized as heliogravures. In New Marilyns, Belin incorporates imagery and text from vintage comic books, while Cover Girls draws on the visual language of fashion and magazine culture. Across both series, the photograph becomes a layered object shaped by surface, reproduction, and myth, presenting identity as something continually constructed and rewritten rather than fixed or revealed.

Belin has exhibited widely at leading international institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her work is held in the permanent collections of major museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2015, she was awarded the Prix Pictet. Her contributions to contemporary art have been further recognized through her appointment as Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2023 and her election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2024.

Belin lives and works in Paris. Edwynn Houk Gallery has represented Valérie Belin since 2013 and has presented five solo exhibitions of her work.