Valérie Jouve

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Valérie Jouve was born in 1964 in Saint-Etienne. She lives and works in Paris.

Photographer and filmmaker, Valérie Jouve tirelessly browses the city in search of its inhabitants. Observer of the urban landscape, she captures a singular space in a particular time, questioning our way to look at things and perceive them.

The photographic work of Valérie Jouve has developed two entities: humans and landscapes, and more generally the city and its outskirts. Each image is constructed around the notion of an encounter between bodies, whether they are individuals, architectures, or landscape components. It is a moving space, fluctuating and shared that the artist highlights in her photographs. Tight frames, suspended bodies. The characters are neither caricatures nor anecdotal. When Valérie Jouve photographs people, while the image is the pretext for the meeting, in the end, it’s the meeting that becomes the pretext for the image.

Valérie Jouve approaches the photographic medium not as a way of showing, but more to feel and stimulate the viewer’s intuitive rapport. While each work retains its own autonomy, the work spreads out in space. Like a musical composition, Valérie Jouve considers the hanging of works as a way of producing motion that arises from the coexistence between images.

She had major solo shows in Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etienne métropole and Petit Palais in Paris (2018), Jeu de Paume (2015), MAC/VAL (2014), FRAC Basse Normandie (2011), Center Pompidou (2010), Sprengel Museum in Hanover (2005), l’IAC de Villeurbanne (2003), Winterthur Museum in Switzerland (2002). Her first film “Grand Littoral” made in 2003, was presented in numerous festivals, as well as at MOMA in New York in 2004.

In 2024, the CPIF (Ile-de-France Photographic Center) dedicates a personal exhibition to her work, entitled “The world is a shelter”, from February 11. Her work is also included in the collective exhibition “Corps à corps” at the Center Pompidou, on view until March 25, 2024.

Public collections (selection): Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; the Center Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris; National Library, Paris; Stedeljikmuseum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausane, Switzerland.