Valérie Favre’s journey into the world of imagination, fantasies, nightmares, memories and captivating works of art history begins with the search for a gorilla buried in her parents’ garden. It is a world that she brings vividly to life on her detour into the sphere of theater and film, and then visualizes as a painter exploring the abysses of human existence. Where does the urgency of these painted images come from, what is their connection to biography, to political and artistic discourses? In their conversation, painter Valérie Favre and writer Axel Ruoff get lost in the labyrinth of questions about painting itself, this unique practice that becomes an act of resistance in a world determined by the digital, threatened by climate change and war.

VALÉRIE FAVRE (*1959, Evilard, Switzerland) is a visual artist and professor of painting at the Berlin University of the Arts. Having worked as a set designer and actress at the theater in Paris in the early 1980s, she turned to contemporary art. 20 years later she reshuffled the cards again and moved to Berlin in 1999. Her painterly work has been widely acclaimed since the early 1990s and has been shown in numerous international exhibitions in museums and galleries.

AXEL RUOFF (*1971, Munich) studied literature, philosophy and art history in Berlin and Aix-en-Provence. He writes novels and essays, makes films and works as an editor. In 2020 he was DAAD Writer in Residence in Birmingham. His novel IRRBLOCK was published in 2021. Ruoff lives in Berlin.