Exhibitions

Académie des beaux-arts, Paris (FR) 12 October 2023 - 26 November 2023

Éloge de l’abstraction.
Les peintres de l’Académie des beaux-arts dans les collections de la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art

The exhibition presents twenty-five paintings from the abstract art collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art. These works illustrate the artistic careers of seven former members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. All contributed to the birth of a new abstraction known as informal art.

Curator: Bertrand Dumas

The works chosen, painted between 1945 and 1965, go against the grain of the dominant geometric abstraction, and are particularly revealing of their period. Despite their stylistic differences They share, despite their stylistic differences, a new conception of painting that is anything but academic. It was a period of extraordinary vitality during which two generations of French and foreign artists merged their fates in Paris. Paris, once again the beacon of the international artistic avant-garde after the war.

The works of Jean Bertholle, Chu Teh-Chun, Olivier Debré, Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Antoni Tàpies and Zao Wou-Ki, chosen by Bertrand Dumas, curator at the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art and curator of this exhibition, embody one of the most fertile periods in the history of twentieth-century art.

Artworks in focus

October 2023 Fine Arts

30.10.61, the fusion between nature and painting in the work
of Zao Wou-Ki

A major figure of French painting in the second half of the 20^th century, Zao Wou-Ki is renowned for his large abstract and lyrical canvases. Over the course of his career, he developed a personal and poetic work, where the fundamentals of Chinese painting may be seen, as evidenced in the painting 30.10.61.

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February 2020 Fine Arts

T 1946–9 by Hans Hartung

As the major retrospective at the Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris draws to a close, another exhibition showcasing the work of Hans Hartung is currently in preparation. Opening at the Caen Memorial Museum on 14 July 2020, the exhibition La Liberation de la peinture, 1945-1962 aims to capture the tremendous momentum driving the European abstract avant-garde, firmly resolved, after the end of the Second World War, to change the course of art forever. T 1946-9 is one of the signature artworks of this creative and contagious euphoria that swept away everything in its path.

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October 2019 Fine Arts

Évanescence by Georges Mathieu

Can chance generate a work of art? In response to this question, the ambitious exhibition Par hasard (By Chance), opening on 17 October at the Centre de la Vieille Charité in Marseille, is full of examples as surprising as they are instructive. From Victor Hugo's ink stains to Christian Jaccard's burnt canvases, by way of Max Ernst's frottages and Jean Dubuffet's texturologies, a whole repertory of free forms appears to have evolved from the uncertainty of the creative gesture. The latter is more or less dependent on chance, according to artists’ conscious or unconscious experimentation with it in the desire to explore its endless possibilities. These include dripping, a process popularised by American painter Jackson Pollock in the 1950s. To understand why and how this new technique changed the course of Western painting, one must go back to its inventor, Georges Mathieu, and especially to Évanescence, one of his groundbreaking artworks painted in 1945.

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