Béatrice Utrilla
Born in 1964
Lives and works in Toulouse
Whether making use of video, photography, installation, text or sound, Béatrice Utrilla’s work examines the status of the image and the relations between the individual and contemporary society. The images that the artist utilises, which she draws from her wealth of personal archives or unearths and reworks like found art pieces, explore a world that is both intimate, familiar, mundane, and also strange.
Formal plant arrangements, but also plants that decorate entrance halls, flowery motifs found on wallpaper, as well as portraits of pinups and call girls, make up Béatrice Utrilla’s heterogeneous imaginary world, in which the vernacular stands alongside the learned.
Motifs, particularly plant motifs, are featured regularly in her photographs, videos and installations, often in conversation with the architecture, in a series of back-and-forth exchanges that her work has centred on throughout the years, the steps of which can be observed in exhibitions that she always approaches as an unexplored field for experimentation.
As a conventional subject of classical painting and a source of inspiration in the decorative arts, flowers are also often associated with the idea of beauty and, because of their ornamental status, with a role traditionally assigned to women in arts and society.
Béatrice Utrilla weaves together a constant dialogue between the exhibition space and mental space, from her first installations to her latest works.
Translated by Lucy Pons, 2023