In Paris, a free exhibition reveals the landscapes of Kate Barry

It is a ribbon of concrete that unfolds facing a sea cove. A tree washed up in the middle of a parking lot. Two wet benches. In the photographic landscapes of Kate Barry (1976–2013), the beach is bare, the puddles reflect nothing, except the waves and the weather, which passes and leaves the paint flaking.

Gray, cold, lonely: so it goes the decor who liked to paint with her darkroom daughter of actress and singer Jane Birkin and British film score composer John Barry.

Through 70 printswe follow the artist, like these little weeds which break through and resist the concrete, in an exhibition currently dedicated to him Baudouin Squareart center in FREE ENTRANCE in the 20^e district of Paris. From her, we knew the glitter, her portraits of actresses on glossy paper, her demons, and his tragic deathafter falling from his Parisian apartment.

From Dinard to Fukushima

Left unfinished, outdoor work by Kate Barry had rarely been highlighted. This is all the work carried out at Carré de Baudouin by curator Sylvain Besson, director of the collections of the Nicéphore-Niépce museum in Chalon-sur-Saôneto which the artist’s relatives donated their fund in 2021.

Dinard looks like a ghost. The sidewalks are wet, the stone is decrepit. We start with a stroll in the seaside resort whose clichés, poetically empty, echo the text of Jean Rolinhis friend who was his companion, and author of Dinard. Real Estate Autobiography Essay (2012). The horizon, often blocked, tells us melancholy. It’s bad weather on the moor.

From 2002, Kate Barry travels, in Jordan, Indiain the regions of France… Fukushimawhere she went after the tsunami with her mother Jane, she captures the desolation. With Jean Rolin, she went in 2007 in Savannahin the southeast of the United States, following in the footsteps of the novelist Flannery O’Connor for location scouting. The adventure is told in a room of the exhibition through a film, which Rolin will repeat…

Weeds

What focuses Kate Barry’s attention are small traces, the “interstices”to quote the title of the exhibition: “it will recurrently, underlines curator Sylvain Besson, show how plants regain their rights. » This obsession could say a lot about the photographer: fight for life, in the greatest discretion. At the entrance to the Carré de Baudouin a single self-portrait was hung. It was made for the magazine Elle in 2000, and Kate Barry hides her face there.