Anne Barrès’ Studio Collection Goes to Auction, Sculpture Without Concession

The corpus of this atypical artist in the French contemporary landscape, who approach to ceramics as a sculptor, reveals a powerful organic body of work.

In a rare move, the Art Valorem auction house has ventured into art publishing. The catalog is much more than just a sales aid: it’s a biography destined to become an enduring reference work. The 146 works going up for auction, comprising the contents of the artist’s studio, are only presented in the second part. Sabine Sourdoire, who developed a passion for the work of Anne Barrès, called on Frédéric Bodet – former curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, former curator of the 20th century and contemporary collections at the Musée National de Céramiques de Sèvres and now independent curator of exhibitions – to accompany her in this ambitious project, which pays tribute to an atypical artist, both sculptor and ceramist.

Although her work has never come up for auction, pieces are often exhibited in museums and galleries, notably at a retrospective at Parc Saint-Joseph, Rodez, in 2008; she has also received public and private commissions in Europe and the USA. The list goes on and on. This is a baptism by fire in the framework of an auction for an artist who has always had a privileged relationship with the earth, and whose work is born from the flame.

The biography is followed by a selection of written commentaries on Anne Barrès’ work, extracts from interviews she has given and her photographic archives, arranged chronologically. Frédéric Bodet wrote the text for the exhibition “Anne Barrès – Rétrospectives” held at Galerie Mercier & Associés in Paris in 2012. It is used in the preface to this catalog to introduce the artist.

Ceramics in Form(s) and Strength(s)

After studying painting at the Montpellier School of Fine Arts in the early 1960s, where she met Vincent Bioulès and Claude Viallat, Anne Barrès trained in ceramics at the Bourges School of Fine Arts, in Jean Lerat ‘s studio, in search of a different form of expression from sculpture. Her encounter with Jean Lerat was to prove decisive, and in his lessons she found the trigger she needed to, in the words of Frédéric Bodet, “establish a generous and uninhibited relationship with this soft material, channeling all its sensuality and energy into sculpture”. It was thus, he adds, that she began “from this period foward, to bring the hard into dialogue with the idea of the soft, to seek out the extreme limits of her favorite material, impertinently thwarting what was commonly expected”. The softness of the clay invites movement, which the firing will then freeze.

It was not until the late 1970s, however, that her first monumental works appeared, a combination of two-tone gray and white porcelain and stoneware, resulting in disconcerting pieces made of accumulated repetitive elements linked by ropes. Like a link between two opposing worlds, ceramics and textiles. She also reinvents the idea of wall hangings, naming them as such, and gives birth to Torchon Puckered (€1,500/2,000), Smocks pincés (€600/800), Grande écharpe (€3,000/5,000), Tricot (€600/800), Mouchoir (€600/800), whose suggested soft shapes are only deceptive in appearance.

The Discovery of Brick and a Return to Stoneware

In 1986, she began her first collaboration with Les Briqueteries du Nord, based in Templeuve. This marked the beginning of a new stage in her career: the design of large-scale sculptures using refractory bricks. Faced with the challenge of restoring flexibility to the line starting from a right angle—she manages to infuse it with fluidity, declaring: “I play on the confusion caused by the ambiguity of hard and soft, cooked and uncooked… The sculptor, like the architect, works on erection and stability. With derision, I study deconstruction and manifest collapse. Although brick might seem restrictive, in reality offers her the full freedom she seeks, as well as multiple possibilities for assembly, which she used to her heart’s content. Knowing perfectly well the material she works with, she leaves no room for randomness and exploits all its possibilities to the full. Two emblematic pieces will be on offer (each estimated at between €4,000 and €6,000): La Triple Poussée (1994) and Les Dynamiques (1995), made up of three sculpture-assemblages. These were previously exhibited in the retrospective at Parc Saint-Joseph.

Deprived of bricks from 1995 onwards, following the end of her partnership with another brickworks in the Toulouse region, Anne Barrès found it impossible to return to the large scale to which she had become accustomed. She imagined transposing her volumes graphically, in so many mental landscapes rendered in pastels – several of which can be snapped up for €400/600 and €600/800. And she did so with “admirable ease and vigor of line”, explains her biographer. But the need to return to sculpture was too strong. In the early 2000s, in her studio in Avrainville (Essonne), which she shared with a young artist, Antoine Barot, new series of flamboyant pieces with allusive vegetal forms blossomed: “Éruptions”, “Soufflées” followed by “Flétries” (between €2,000 and €5,000 will be demanded for each). Here, stoneware in black, gray or brown is combined with rusted metal, perched in suspension on these stems or spouting from tubular chimneys.

With this sale at Drouot, Anne Barrès’ entire career is given shape by the works that tomorrow will change and enhance spaces. It offers a perfect summary of a life of demanding work, carried out without ever conceding to easy aestheticism or anecdote. There’s a kind of austerity in these pieces that may be disconcerting, but doesn’t leave one indifferent, so much imagination and suggestion have taken over. The final word goes to the creator: “I think what’s important in a work of art is that it gets the viewer’s imagination going.”