Born in Tokyo in 1962 and based in Paris since 1993, Yuki Onodera first attracted attention with her series Portraits of Second-hand Clothes (1994-1997), photographs of used clothes acquired during an exhibition by Christian Boltanski. In his installation, wrinkled and abandoned, the old clothes symbolized death.

Onodera photographed them simply, one by one, in black and white, floating in the sky in front of her window, as if restoring them to life. Since then, she has frequently removed ordinary, concrete things (faces, houses, cars, birds, insects …) from their habitual context, transforming them to reveal an extraordinary, poetic inner world. Ghostly portraits, levitating objects, and architecture reduced to luminous halos appear evanescent and unreal, yet are also the result of a complex physical process. Before making her photographs, which she prints herself, the artist manipulates her images through collages and superimpositions that trouble the spectator in subtle ways.

“Each photograph results from distortions and from tiny, intentional shifts that infiltrate her information system,” writes Evence Verdier. “Photography brings out a truth that is her own, a truth full of poetry and charm. She does not record what is visible; she creates, or rather invents, something visible with light. She goes to what is essential, using photography as a way of constructing another reality.”

In this exhibition, Yuki Onodera presents works from three series: Transvest (2002), Eleventh Finger (2006) and her most recent work, Muybridge’s Twist (2013 to 2015), shown here for the first time.