PARIS.- Frrom May 9 to August 25 2019, LE BAL presents the first exhibition in Paris of the German artist Barbara Probst.

Using a radio-controlled release system, Barbara Probst triggers simultaneous shots of the same event, gesture or action from different distances and angles. This moment multiplied into several views constitutes an exposure, a constellation of perspectives that induces multifaceted, sometimes contradictory readings of the image.

Barbara Probst is not interested so much in what is represented as in the way it is represented. Using gestures, faces and objects that are as neutral as possible, she minimises the narrative character of each view and seeks a more open, more ambiguous rendering. She has always been intrigued by the 1960s writers and filmmakers who broke with classical narrative, like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean-Luc Godard. “Their way of storytelling was to go against the expectations of the reader or viewer by creating cracks and gaps in the story or by unexpectedly changing the perspective. They treated the narrative not unlike a cubist painter treated space…”

Her work is based on her early years of study at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, where she studied sculpture. “We were modeling with clay every day with a nude model posing for us. We would create a three-dimensional image of our model as naturalistically as possible. The nude model would stand on a turntable that we would turn every 10 minutes by about 30 or 40 degrees, so that each student could see every possible angle of the model.” As a photographer, Barbara Probst sculpts time. And she imposes a grid of spatial reading on our perception of the image.

In her work, the staging is part of the random flow of life, blurring a little further the traces between what has been imagined and what has happened. The image, a ˝collective hallucination˝ according to Roland Barthes, becomes a mental puzzle to be reconfigured. The striking format of the exposures, their display on the wall, their complex construction: everything invites the viewer to scrutinise, to investigate, to move so as to mentally reconstruct a possible version of the moment. By questioning clues, calculating positions and eliminating the impossible, we come to experience, in space and time, the verisimilitude of the image and the validity of our own gaze.

At stake here is the perception of the image and its authority in relation to the event represented. Is one point of view truer, more real or more legitimate than another? In this profusion of possible meanings, how is the reality of an event established? Barbara Probst disorients and disrupts our ability to understand the world by seeing it. The world, perceived as a synchronous cluster of divergent viewpoints, becomes an unstable space to be recomposed. And the truth, this shifting ground, an equation to be solved. — Frédéric Paul and Diane Dufour, curators

Born in 1964 in Munich, Barbara Probst studied sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich and photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She began her career with sculptural works and then, since the year 2000, has been working on a photographic series entitled Exposures, in which she abandons the single-eye gaze of the camera and divides it into various points of view. Thanks to a radio-controlled release system, she can simultaneously trigger the shutters of several cameras pointed at the same event or subject from different angles and various distances. For Probst, this fragmentation of the instant into a series of images is the tool for exploring the many ambiguities inherent to the photographic image.

Recipient of the Philip Morris Award from Dresden (2002) and the Photography Award from the Arts Council of Munich (1994), she has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (2007), the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2008), the FRAC Brittany Domaine de Kerguehennec, Bignan, France (2008), the Kunstverein Oldenburg (2009), the Art Center Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2014), the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen (2013), the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2014). She also participated to numerous group shows in major museums such as the Saint Louis Art Museum (2012), the Tate Modern in London (2010), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2010) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006, 2010).

Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including Folkwang Museum, Essen; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; Städitsche Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich ; Museum of Modern Art, New York ; the Withney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa ; Centre Pompidou, Paris and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In 2007, Steidl published an extensive monograph of her work, Barbara Probst: Exposures , followed by two other books, Barbara Probst (Hatje Cantz, 2014) and Barbara Probst, 12 Moments (Hartmann Books, 2016).

Barbara Probst lives and works in New York and Munich. She is represented by Kuckei + Kuckei Gallery in Berlin, Monica de Cardenas Gallery in Milan and Bohman-Knäpper Gallery in Stockholm.