Odile Bernard Schröder
Photographer Visual Artist
Odile Bernard Schröder (1962, Paris) is a photographer and author of films, objects and installations. At the age of sixteen, she learned black and white printing in some of Paris’ most renowned laboratories (Atelier Demi-Tint, Studio 44, PICTO …). She enriches her experience in the field of professional photography as a studio photographer and performs portraits for periodicals such as Challenges, Liberation …
From 1992, she devoted herself exclusively to her personal research started in the 1980’s. The works of this period are part of the tradition of street photography with conceptual and humanistic accents. The second half of the 1990’s gave rise to a long-term documentary cycle devoted to a prostitute in the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis district of Paris (Anne / Anna, 1996-1998). In the following decades, cycles marked by social concerns are more allusive, often using metonymy (La Petite Ceinture, 2000-2001). In the years that follow, the phase of darkroom work occupies a prominent place in the interpretation or the elaboration of images. Works that use alternative photographic processes, or old techniques or finally the only chemistry of photography are born: photogram, cyanotype, glass-cliché, chemigram … Formally close to geometric abstraction or gestural painting. the works of the second half of the 2000s are about themes marked by introspection and mysticism.
The artist does not neglect the terrain of figuration and simultaneously produces anthropomorphic artifacts intended to be photographed. The regular use of old photographic papers (Brovira, Orwo …), or borrowing from the aesthetics of the past century that it associates with those of contemporary graphic interfaces, are intended to emphasize the relationship of credulity towards photography that continues in the era of the digital revolution. Thus, in 2017, she makes a commentary on the French presidential campaign and its surge of images through the prism of esotericism.
EXHIBITIONS
2019 « Drawing Art Fair » Art Fair, Paris
2018. Biennale Warszawa"Populism and contemporary promise
2017 « Revelation-Revolution » solo exhibition, Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw
2017 « Festival Aperçu » group show, Lyon
2014 « Mirror Incantatoire » solo exhibition, Marquise Dance Hall, Istanbul
2013 « Prosthetic Measures » video installation, Skopia Gallery, Geneva
2011 « Gloria Hole » group show, Fireplace Project, New York
2010 « Martingale » Galerie Gordon Pym, Paris
2010 group show, Marquise Dance Hall, Istanbul
2004 « Shadow of a Doubt » solo exhibition, Neue Dokumente, Berlin
2002 participation in Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Champigny sur Marne
2001 group show, Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Paris
1995 group show, Galerie No se le Diga a Nadie, Madrid
1993 participation at Rencontres Internationales d’Arles
PUBLICATIONS
2013 Sang Bleu VI
2012 GQ
2011 Novembre
2010 Sang Bleu
2005 freier – Magazine for the Mental State
COLLECTIONS
Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, collections privés
