Photographer Marina Faust, former Margiela collaborator, center stage at new exhibition in France On view at FRAC Limoges starting December 10

Following her 2017 solo exhibition at Le Consortium in Dijon as well as several presentations at Galerie Xippas in Paris and at the Gianni Manhattan art fair, Marina Faust returns to France with a new body of work. Conceived as part of the curatorial program "Sans contrefaçon..." in collaboration with Phileas and the Austrian Cultural Forum, the exhibition focuses on a series of shoes dating from the early 2000s, never before shown in an institutional setting. Far from being approached as simple fashion or everyday objects, the shoes become complex architectural structures under Faust’s lens and hands. Collected over many years, they are deconstructed and altered by the artist. Through subtle interventions and contextual shifts, these familiar objects shed their original utility to take on a new presence as autonomous sculptural forms.

An artistic approach focused on transforming the everyday

This method is a direct continuation of Marina Faust’s photographic practice. Whether working in sculpture or image-making, the everyday serves as her primary starting point. The artist employs processes of appropriation, transformation, and contextual displacement to give familiar or found objects new meaning. The perception, function, and cultural associations of an object are thus continually renegotiated.

Born in 1950 in Vienna, where she currently lives and works, Marina Faust began her photographic journey at the age of 18, producing photojournalism for the Austrian press. After moving to Paris, she collaborated with the Magnum agency starting in 1975, later working for the Italian fashion magazine Harper’s Gran Bazaar. Alongside her early solo exhibitions, the artist initiated an uninterrupted collaboration of over twenty years with Maison Martin Margiela beginning in 1990, while also fulfilling assignments for the American monthly Architectural Digest from 1985 to 2012. Parallel to this commercial work, she developed personal research on the body and self-portraiture, using tight framing to fragment the figure. Since 2010, the artist has focused her inquiries on the ontological status of the artwork, notably through exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien and a 2012 collaboration with Franz West at Gagosian.

This exhibition is part of a cycle that examines the back-and-forth dialogue between how we view and reflect upon visible or concealed bodies through clothing. A tool for emancipation and identity expression, clothing belongs to both the intimate and social spheres. Oscillating between tinkering and repurposing, the exhibited works sit at the intersection of visual arts, performance, dance, and theater.

By bringing together decades of visual research, this exhibition at FRAC Limoges offers a fascinating dive into Marina Faust's highly singular body of work. By subverting everyday objects to better question our environment and our bodies, the artist helps us reinvent how we view reality, making this winter event an unmissable highlight of the end of the year.

Starting December 10 at FRAC-Artothèque. 17bis rue Charles-Michels, 87000 Limoges. Free admission