Valérie Belin

She has maintained a long-standing relationship with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, who has supported her work since the late 1990s. Invited in 1999 to take part in the exhibition 1 monde réel she created a series devoted to robots from the collection of Rolf Fehlbaum, the president of Vitra. In 2017, she contributed to the exhibition Autophoto with a series of photographs of automobile engines. Works from her Robots and Venise 2 series have since entered the Fondation Cartier’s Collection.  

Trained at the Écoles des beaux-arts in Versailles and Bourges, and holding a postgraduate degree in art philosophy, Belin has developed a body of work influenced by minimalism and conceptual art. She photographs faces, bodies, and objects in series, each rigorously devoted to a single subject. Whether isolating subjects with razor-sharp precision or layering images to saturation, she creates the same sense of unease: that of a representation too perfect, too constructed to be real. “My work consists in exaggerating what happens on the surface of things… what I want to show is the lie of beauty,” she explains. This approach creates a troubling ambiguity between the real and the artificial, the living and the fabricated, producing an effect of uncanny strangeness. Winner of the Prix Pictet in 2015, Valérie Belin has exhibited widely around the world, and her works are held in numerous public and private collections. Named Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017, she joined the Académie des Beaux-Arts in January 2026.