Threads

with Béatrice Kohler Starakis & Valentine Prissette

12 June — 25 July 2025

Faire défaire refaire encore ce fil de lumière
— Goliarda Sapienza

Seeking threads of memory, of presence and absence, of continuation and rupture, Sainte Anne Gallery is pleased to present the works of Béatrice Kohler Starakis and Valentine Prissette.
Finding a dialogue between the two female artists who thread their personal stories in the most delicate of mediums.
Béatrice Kohler Starakis born in Athens in 1938, and Valentine Prissette born in Libourne in 1998, both embrace the multidimensionality of the material and weave their own visual intimacies. Intimacy here understood within the tenderness of a secret, within a safe space of knowing and sharing only in the most ciphered of languages. Béatrice Kohler Starakis presents her paintings as threads of a visual diary, capturing the poetry of life in her structural, yet organic compositions. The transparency of her work is so direct - like a flower put in between pages of a book, to savour the memory of a moment. Making volumes of meanings from the floating shapes and symbols, each folding of the material as a story to be discovered. Just like the flower embraced within two pages, we feel her work to capture a moment so particular, it is only truly known to her, who put the compositions together. It seems like each painting is an ongoing research, rather than a finished work. All of them together feel like the flowers the artist collected through her life, each corresponding to a different chapter, yet embraced within the same book. Valentine Prissette’s textile works honour a similar gesture of collecting, memorising and elaborating. Her textile compositions thread intimacy of memories, that she carefully translates into tiny scenes of their own. Honouring each piece of fabric within their own presence, she brings forward the question of a sensation, that once was. She echoes stories of closeness, of inheritance, and blends them with her own visual language - therefore becoming one with all the previous beholders. Her work seems to unite the most gentle, yet so ephemeral moments in life. With her tender gesture, Valentine Prissette reminds us to not fade into forgetfulness.

– Alicja Brzeska, June 2025