Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes @ James Cohan, NYC

Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes

James Cohan, New York

May 16 - July 25, 2025

Toshiko Takaezu

Three Graces, ca. 2000s

Cast bronze, left: 78 x 22 in.,

middle: 74 x 21 in., right: 76 x 23 in.

Courtesy the Estate of Toshiko Takaezu

and James Cohan

James Cohan presents an exhibition of monumental sculptures by the late artist Toshiko Takaezu (b. 1922, Pepeekeo, Hawaii - d. 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii) on view at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. Toshiko Takaezu was celebrated for her experimental approach to abstraction and form over a lengthy career, which spanned the 1950s into the 2000s. While she is widely known for her painterly ceramics, Takaezu spent three decades mastering the possibilities of bronze. Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes foregrounds her series of outdoor sculptures in the medium. 

Toshiko Takaezu’s initial foray into bronze was tied to her strong interest in the natural world. Starting in the 1980s, she worked closely with a team of artists and apprentices at the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey to render her creations using the lost-wax casting process. Takaezu’s soaring Stack Forms, ca. 1982-4, were directly inspired by her series of ceramic River Stones: convex circular forms glazed in tones akin to a riverbed of pebbles, such as earthy ochres and soft whites. In the main gallery, tall tree trunks in rich blue and green patinas are cradled by white pebbles and flanked by otherworldly globes. Tree-Man Forest, 1989, is a reverential meditation on both the precarity and resilience of natural life. Takaezu was deeply moved by a trip she took in 1973 to “Devastation Trail” on the Big Island of Hawaii, where she encountered a forest laid bare by the volcanic eruption of Kīlauea Iki in 1959. Toshiko Takaezu paid homage to this transformational event first in clay, and then in bronze, giving permanence to these majestic forms and embedding them into the land. 

The epic Three Graces, ca. 2000s, emits a powerful anthropomorphic presence; one that visitors can engage with as they circumnavigate each form. Takaezu’s first iteration of Three Graces was cast in 1994 and is installed at Grounds For Sculpture in New Jersey. These sculptures echo Takaezu’s classical tall ‘closed forms’ and showcase the artist’s mastery of gesture, visible in her application of dripping chemical patinas in deep blues, blacks and greens. In Greek mythology, the Three Graces were the daughters of Zeus–goddesses of beauty, charm and grace, often depicted together, interlaced in mid-dance The martyred saints Faith, Hope, and Charity, represent three similar theological virtues in Christian theology. These overlapping concepts are embodied in these monumental and undulating bronzes, forever linked as a trio. 

The singular resonant Untitled (Bell), 2004, perfectly concretizes Takaezu’s interest in sound and materiality. It is one of several forms that were inspired by the ceremonial bells of Japanese temples, and is similarly reliant on the strike of a mallet to produce a deep vibrational ring. This imposing bronze bell hangs from a custom interlocking wooden frame designed by the artist. Its dimensional surface resulted from Takaezu pouring hot wax in linear motions over the domed mold prior to its casting; an action that harkens back to her dynamic glazing process. 

Toshiko Takaezu’s achievements in bronze are a testament to her boundless exploration across mediums. Takaezu’s sculptures are monuments that reflect the natural world; fusing gesture and form through material permanence. Toshiko Takaezu: Bronzes unites carefully considered groupings which serve as sites for contemplation that engage the senses.

Born in Pepeekeo, Hawaii in 1922 to Japanese immigrant parents, Toshiko Takaezu first studied at the University of Hawaii, and later at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Toshiko Takaezu was a devoted maker and art educator, having taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Princeton University, until her retirement in 1992. She lived and worked in rural New Jersey through the 2000s. Toshiko Takaezu passed away in Honolulu on March 9, 2011. Throughout the artist’s lifetime, her work was exhibited widely in the United States and Japan, including a solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2004) and a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan (1995). Toshiko Takaezu was the recipient of the Tiffany Foundation Grant (1964) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980), among others. Her work is represented in many notable collections including the DeYoung/Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Honolulu Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Recent exhibitions include the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani and presentations at the MFA Boston (2023) and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2024). In March 2024, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum hosted Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, the first touring retrospective in twenty years. It has traveled to the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and will open at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025) and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026)

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

Sarah Crowner @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris "Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze" Exhibition

Sarah Crowner 

Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze 

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris 

26 April – 21 June 2025

SARAH CROWNER

Black and Blues and Oranges, both 2024 (details) 

© Sarah Crowner

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, presents Tableaux en Laine, Pierres en Bronze, a solo exhibition by SARAH CROWNER, uniting a new series of embroideries, bronze sculptures and canvases. This is the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, and her first presentation in Paris.

Sarah Crowner is renowned for her investigations into colour, materiality and form. Her works, which span painting, sculpture, collage, tile installations and set design, invite a close engagement with the viewer. Subverting expectations of structure, texture and palette, they elicit new ways of slow and deliberate looking. For this exhibition, Sarah Crowner foregrounds abstract colour fields and juxtaposes hard and soft, reflective and absorbent, surfaces.

Five wool embroidered works from 2024 mark a new development in the artist’s practice. At first glance, they appear to be monochromatic canvases, each composed from a vibrating expanse of colour. Contemplated up close, however, they reveal themselves to be handmade objects, created stitch-by-stitch in snaking tendrils, from a varied range of hues. This subtle yet integral plurality is reflected in the titles of the works: Reds, Oranges, Blacks and Blues, Violets, and Whites. Under the changing, dappled light, one almost perceives the individual threads of wool as impasto brushstrokes, which take partial inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, 1889, as well as his paintings made in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The textured palette and swirling intensity of his canvases can be traced in the eddying surfaces of Crowner’s embroideries.

Collaboration plays a central role in Crowner’s practice. For the new ‘Tableaux en Laine’, she worked closely with a group of more than twenty embroiderers, based in Maine, USA. Ranging from school age to septuagenarians, they worked together to meticulously stitch each composition by hand over many days, based on ‘stitch map’ drawings created by the artist. These ‘maps’ are used as directional guides to translate colour and line into physical objects and ground the works within a formal painterly language. ‘It always goes back to painting’, the artist states.

While making her recent embroideries, Sarah Crowner was looking closely at the work of Richard Serra, from his early steel slabs to his black, monochrome drawings. Ostensibly simple, the drawings reveal what Sarah Crowner describes as ‘this heavy working, made gesture by gesture’ from thick oil sticks. Similarly, despite first appearances, his weighty and dense sculptures are speckled with patina, embedding within them a sense of passing time. Whether cast, stitched or sewn, this inherent slipperiness between expectation, perception and reality lies at the heart of Crowner’s practice.

In response to the wool paintings, Crowner’s ‘Pierres en Bronze’ sculptures are displayed almost as if they are onlookers, their highly polished surfaces reflecting spills and splashes of colour from the lush wool works. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, the bronze surfaces activate, generating new abstractions which are constantly in flux. Hard, heavy and solid, the sculptures are simultaneously ephemeral, as light, time and transience permeate their shifting surfaces. These Stone sculptures, as their titles insinuate, are based on small stones that Sarah Crowner has collected over the years from Rincon Beach in California, near where she grew up. With their natural holes and pockmarks, the stones resemble small Modernist sculptures, transformed here from their once matte and lightweight forms into enlarged and shiny bronzes.

In her sewn canvases, exhibited in the gallery space in Paris, Sarah Crowner melds order and spontaneity. Working according to a process she describes as ‘slow, fast, slow, fast, instinctual versus methodical’, she draws inspiration from elements of nature as much as art history. In Skyline (Blues) and Seafloor (Greens), both 2025, the shapes echo one another, leaving the viewer with a lingering feeling of déjà vu. First, the paintings appear as familiar fields of drawn lines, forms and colours; it is only from up close that one sees their inherent structure: cut fragments carefully sutured to form a greater whole.

Emphasising the act of transformation in her work, Crowner’s hard sculptures, soft textured embroideries, and cut and sewn canvases each encapsulate something of their opposite, encouraging the viewer to contemplate the yin-yang dualities of the everyday.

SARAH CROWNER (b. 1974, Philadelphia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist’s work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions including SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2025); The Chinati Foundation, Marfa (2022–2024); Hill Art Foundation, New York; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (both 2023–2024); Auroras and Casa de Vidro, Instituto Bardi, São Paulo (2023); Museo Amparo, Puebla (2022–2023); KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville (2018–2019); and MASS MoCA, North Adams (2016–2017). Sarah Crowner’s works are in the collections of major international institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; The Contemporary Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER, PARIS

46 rue du Temple, 75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze @ 125 Newbury Gallery, New York

Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze

125 Newbury Gallery, New York

January 24 - April 12, 2025

Lucas Samaras 

Untitled, July 17, 1962 

© Lucas Samaras, courtesy Pace Gallery

125 Newbury presents Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze, an exhibition of two distinct yet related bodies of work by the Greek-born American artist, a pivotal figure in the New York avant-garde. This presentation brings a selection of more than two dozen vibrant, never-before-seen pastels from the 1960s into dialogue with a suite of figurative bronze sculptures that Samaras created in the early 1980s. 

Lucas Samaras began employing pastels at a young age, partly as a means of communication. After his family emigrated from Greece to the United States during the 1940s to escape the country’s brutal civil war, Samaras, who spoke no English upon his arrival in America, saw pastels as an outlet for his inner world. “Art was the only thing I could do without speaking,” the artist explained in an interview, “They just gave me paper and pastels, and I drew.” He carried this interest through high school and college, studying under the influential artists Allan Kaprow and George and Helen Segal at Rutgers University.

Known for his critical role in the Happenings movement of the late 1950s, his enigmatic sculptural boxes and chairs, and his expansive and protean photographic practice, Samaras’s comparatively lesser known work in pastel was nevertheless integral to his practice. “One might say that the pastels are the foundation of Samaras’s work,” explains Arne Glimcher, curator of the exhibition and the artist’s friend and dealer for over 50 years, “It was in pastel that he invented not only his palette but himself.” Samaras first exhibited his pastels at New York’s Green Gallery in the early 1960s. More recently, these works were the subject of a major 2016 exhibition at The Morgan Library.

The selection of pastels included in this exhibition reflects Samaras’s deep interest in the lurid, almost vulgarly chromatic possibilities—and the powdery materiality—of the medium. Many of the works consist of self-portraits, where faces or body parts appear fragmented or contorted, rendered in stark contrast against monochromatic backgrounds. Elsewhere, the face merges with its prismatic surroundings, threatening the solidity of the body’s border with the world.

Relentless and constantly shapeshifting in his pursuit of formal evolution, Lucas Samaras turned towards the medium of bronze on only a few occasions throughout his long career. In this suite of works created during the early 1980s, he explored concerns of flesh and figure through an almost alchemical treatment of metal. Like his early pastels, the bronzes evoke the softness of the body, improbably transmuting the hardness of metal into the tenderness of flesh. The resulting sculptures are among the only figurative images that Lucas Samaras created which are not self-portraits. Instead, they seem to speak to a more generalized notion of the human condition––what it might look or feel like to inhabit a body from the inside out, externalizing an otherwise inaccessible interiority. If the pastels embody meditations on a vibrant mode of life-turned-art, the bronzes represent their contorted doubles.

Small in scale but capacious in their emotional depth, Samaras’s bronze figures offer visions of twisting or perhaps melting bodies. Often plated with silver or gold, they fold over and into themselves as flesh might. Figures recline alone or appear intertwined with one another. Moments of embrace reveal themselves in the murky shimmer of the metal. The boundaries between agony and ecstasy, between self and other, begin to dissolve.

Presented together for the first time since a 1982 exhibition at Pace Gallery, these two bodies of work feed into and inform one another. Together, they reflect the artist’s unflinching exploration of what it felt like to inhabit his own body, both in the physical and psychic registers. As a pastel face dissolves into polychrome rays of light, a bronze body takes shape from its primordial ground, producing a sense of struggle that distills Samaras’s lifelong investigation of the nature of selfhood and embodiment.

Eluding historical categorization, Lucas Samaras’s (b. 1936, Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece; d. 2024, New York) oeuvre is united through its consistent focus on the body and psyche, often emphasizing autobiography. The themes of self-depiction, self-investigation, and identity were a driving force behind his practice, which, at its onset in the early 1960s, advanced the Surrealist idiom while proposing a radical departure from the presiding themes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Samaras emigrated with his family from Greece to the United States in 1948 and attended Rutgers University, New Jersey, studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, and then at Columbia University, New York, where he studied art history under Meyer Schapiro. During this time, he initiated painting self-portraits and gravitated toward the use of pastels, which enabled him to work quickly, exploring figurative and geometrical forms in rich colors and with luxuriant texture, characteristics that would reoccur throughout his practice. He soon shifted toward objects, producing assemblage reliefs and boxes comprised of elements culled from his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores—cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly colored yarn, and feathers—affixed with liquid aluminum or plaster. Gesturing toward a larger investigation of (self) reflection in his work found in his early mirror rooms, self-portraiture, and more recent use of digital mirror-imaging, Samaras’s oeuvre acts as an extension of his body while underscoring the transformative possibilities of the everyday—a true blurring of art and life.

In 1969, Lucas Samaras began to expand upon his use of photography, experimenting with a Polaroid 360 camera, which appealed to his sense of immediacy. His innovation further materialized with his use of the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973 in a melding of self-portraiture and abstraction, created by manipulating the wet-dye emulsions with a stylus or fingertip before the chemicals set. This process progressed with digital art in 1996 when he obtained his first computer and began to experiment with printed texts on typewriter paper. By 2002, he had acquired a digital camera, and the use of Photoshop became an integral component of his practice. These technologies gave way to Photofictions (2003), a series characterized by distorted self-portraits and psychedelic compositions.

125 NEWBURY

395 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

www.125newbury.com

Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC & Shanghai Museum

Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

February 28 – September 28, 2025

Shanghai Museum 

November 12, 2025 – March 16, 2026

Incense burner in the form of a goose, China, 

Ming dynasty (1368–1644), early 15th century. Bronze

H. 14 1/2 in. (36.8 cm); W. 18 3/4 in. (47 6 cm)

Purchase, The Vincent Astor Foundation Gift, 2020 - 2020.335a, b

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Water dropper in the form of a rhinoceros

China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 15th century, Bronze

H. 2 1/8 in (5.4 cm); W. 5 in. (12.7 cm); D. 1 7/8 in. (4.8 cm)  

Purchase, The Vincent Astor Foundation Gift, 2015 - 2015.294

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Taihe" bell, note "Jiazhong"

China, Song dynasty (960–1279), ca. 1105, reinscribed ca. 1174

Bronze, H. 9 in. (22.8 cm)

Courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing

In ancient China, bronze vessels were emblems of ritual and power. A millennium later, in the period from 1100 to 1900, such vessels were rediscovered as embodiments of a long-lost golden age that was worthy of study and emulation. This “return to the past” (fugu) was part of a widespread phenomenon across all the arts to reclaim the virtues of a classical tradition. An important aspect of this phenomenon was the revival of bronze casting as a major art form. Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 aims to be the most comprehensive study of Chinese bronzes during this period. This exhibition, co-organized by The Met and the Shanghai Museum, where it will open following its display in New York, presents the new aesthetic represented by these creative adaptations of the past, while exploring their cultural and political significance throughout China’s long history.

“While bronze as an art form has long held a significant role throughout China’s history, this exhibition explores an often-overlooked time period when a resurgence of craftsmanship and artistic achievements revitalized the medium,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Bringing together major loans from institutions in China alongside works from The Met collection, this exhibition offers viewers an important opportunity to better understand the lasting aesthetic and cultural impact of bronze objects.”

The exhibition is divided into five thematic and chronological sections that explicate over 200 works of art—an array of bronze vessels complemented by a selection of paintings, ceramics, jades, and other media. Some 100 pieces from The Met collection will be augmented by nearly 100 loans from major institutions in China, Japan, Korea, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States to present the most comprehensive narrative of the ongoing importance of bronzes as an art medium throughout China’s long history. Featured in the exhibition are around 60 loans from institutions in China, including major works such as a monumental 12th-century bell with imperial procession from the Liaoning Provincial Museum, documented ritual bronzes for Confucian temples from the Shanghai Museum, and luxury archaistic vessels made in the 18th-century imperial workshop from the Palace Museum, Beijing.

Vase with archaistic design

China, Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), 14th century

Bronze, H. 15 1/2 in. (39.4 cm) ; Diam. 8 in. (20.3 cm); 

Diam. of rim 4 3/8 in. (11.1 cm); Diam. of foot 5 5/8 in. (14.3 cm) 

Purchase, Brooke Russell Astor Bequest, 2014 - 2014.449

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ritual vessel (xizun)

China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 

Qianlong mark and period (1736–95)

Bronze, H. 15 3/16 in. (38.6 cm);

Diam. 4 5/16 in. (11 cm); Wt. 36,4 lb (16.5 kg)

Courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing

The exhibition begins with the section “Reconstructing Ancient Rites,” which introduces how emperors and scholar-officials commissioned ritual bronzes from the 12th to the 16th century as part of an effort to restore and align themselves with antique ceremonies and rites. The exhibition continues with “Experimenting with Styles,” illustrating how the form, decoration, and function of ancient bronzes were creatively reinterpreted from the 13th to the 15th century. The next section, “Establishing New Standards,” explores further transformations in both the aesthetic and technical direction of bronze making from the 15th to the 17th century. The fourth section, “Living with Bronzes,” features a display in the Ming Furniture Room (Gallery 218) to demonstrate how bronzes were used in literati life from the 16th to the 19th century. The last section, “Harmonizing with Antiquity,” examines how the deep scholarly appreciation of archaic bronzes during the 18th and 19th centuries led to a final flourishing of bronze production.

Pengliang Lu, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art at The Met, said: “This exhibition attempts a long-overdue reevaluation of later Chinese bronzes by seeking to establish a reliable chronology of this art form across the last millennium of Chinese history. The exhibition will also distinguish outstanding works from lesser examples based on their artistic and cultural merits.”

This exhibition provides visitors with a captivating experience as they follow the shifting cultural roles and evolving canons of beauty represented in later bronzes.

Installation view of Recasting the Past: 

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900, 

on view February 28 – September 28, 2025 

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Photo by Paul Lachenauer, courtesy of The Met

Installation view of Recasting the Past: 

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900, 

on view February 28 – September 28, 2025 

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Photo by Paul Lachenauer, courtesy of The Met

Installation view of Recasting the Past: 

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900, 

on view February 28 – September 28, 2025 

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Photo by Paul Lachenauer, courtesy of The Met

Later Chinese bronzes have long been stigmatized as poor imitations of ancient bronzes rather than being seen as fundamentally new creations with their own aesthetic and functional character. This exhibition redresses this misunderstanding by showcasing their artistic virtuosity, innovative creativity, and wide cultural impact. Through archaeologically recovered examples and cross-medium comparisons to a wide range of objects, the exhibition demonstrates the ongoing importance and influence of bronzes as well as how they inspired the form and function of works in other media.

Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 is curated by Pengliang Lu, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. A beautiful and very interesting book!

Recasting the Past

The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100-1900

by Pengliang Lu

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Distributed by Yale University Press

304 pages, 9.50 x 11.20 in, 300 color illus.

Hardcover, 9781588397904, 15 April 2025

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 209-218

www.metmuseum.org

SHANGHAI MUSEUM

www.shanghaimuseum.net

Will Boone @ Karma Gallery, NYC - No Man’s Land

Will Boone: No Man’s Land

Karma, New York

January 7– February 25, 2023

Karma presents No Man’s Land, a solo exhibition of new sculpture by WILL BOONE.

No Man’s Land is a scenic exhibition that began for Will Boone with an encounter at a swap meet in 2017. Among a menagerie of figurines, toys, horror movie monsters, and busts of United States presidents and music legends, Boone found resonance with sculptures of antiquity. Medusa and Julius Caesar were swapped for Frankenstein and John F. Kennedy; dinged-up plastic and flaking enamel paint took the place of chipped marble and weathered bronze. 

In more than forty works, Will Boone transforms relics of Americana into bronze statues. Like a model toy, Boone hand-paints each with enamel paint, producing a brushy and vibrant surface. Amidst cacti and aloes, a tiger and a barking dog have a standoff at the gallery’s center. A rabbit leaps across a skull and an eagle hangs from the ceiling. A vulture perches on a rock, surveying bones. Several works are deliberately paired together, forming tableaus: a rat and a ribcage, a dinosaur and a tree stump, a spider’s web amidst barren branches, a cactus and a foot. A sculpture hall sourced from the desert of American culture, the exhibition marks the first time this body of work will be shown in its entirety. 

To Donald Judd, Texas famously offered a “featureless landscape,” an empty space that harmonized with his sculptural practice. For Will Boone, Texas is “featured”—defined by cultural artifacts, by its specificities, by a chorus of oddities, exemplified in the roadside attractions and strange monuments through which small towns assert themselves against the monotony Judd embraced. Boone’s bronze sculptures are made in Bastrop, a small town, home to a gas station barbecue joint featured in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a foundry that produces statues and roadside attractions. 

Bronze ensures that Will Boone’s figures will last far into the future, where they will become relics in their own right. This vastness of time attains a symmetrical spatiality with the vastness of the desert. In doing so, Boone reminds us that his sculptures’ bright exteriors will eventually fade, rusting into the inexorable unknown, into No Man’s Land. 

KARMA

22 East 2nd Street, New York, NY, 10003

karmakarma.org

_____________

Bronzes, Galerie Maeght, Paris

Bronzes
Galerie Maeght, Paris
23 janvier - 7 mars 2015

Georges Braque, Pur-sang, 1956. 

Bronze sur pierre. 35 x 29 cm. 

© Galerie Maeght, Paris

La Galerie Maeght met à l’honneur le bronze dans une exposition où les oeuvres sculptées des plus grands maîtres dialoguent avec celles, récentes, d’artistes contemporains : de Georges Braque, Eduardo Chillida, André Derain, Alberto Giacometti, Roger de La Fresnaye, Joan Miró, Paul Rebeyrolle, Jean-Paul Riopelle et Raoul Ubac, à Ruth Adler, Nicolas Alquin, Marco Del Re, Joanet Gardy-Artigas, François Lamore, Daniel Milhaud et Manolo Valdès.

Isabelle Maeght, directrice de la Galerie Maeght, rend hommage au matériau noble et exigeant qu’est le bronze par une sélection de très belles oeuvres d’artistes majeurs du XXe et XXIe siècle. L’exposition est l’occasion de (re)découvrir ce matériau à travers un ensemble d’oeuvres originales ou inédites comme l’un des rares bronzes qu’Ubac ait réalisé. Couleurs, formes, toucher, classicisme et contemporanéité : Isabelle Maeght a choisi de montrer la fascinante diversité offerte par ce médium.

« Le bronze, matériau aussi mythique qu’exigeant techniquement, offre aux artistes des possibilités immenses en même temps qu’il leur permet de renouveler leur langage artistique. L’oeuvre sculpté de Miró a révolutionné ce champ artistique. Le « Pur-Sang » de Braque qui semble jaillir de fouilles archéologiques revendique un héritage classique en même temps qu’une intense modernité », précise Isabelle Maeght.

Joan Miró, Femme, 1968 

Bronze, 69,5 x 32 x 23,5 cm. 

© Galerie Maeght, Paris

Joan Miró, Tête de Tériade, 1975 

Bronze, 32 x 39 x 25 cm. 

© Galerie Maeght, Paris

Miró, sculpteur. L'exposition présente une dizaine d’oeuvres sculptées de Miró. D’une puissance exceptionnelle, ses bronzes témoignent de l’importance qu’il accorde au rendu des matières et aux textures. Recouverts d’une patine naturelle, ses bronzes gardent une certaine rugosité comme ils incitent à la caresse. Sans cesse à la recherche de nouvelles formes et supports, Miró transgresse avec le bronze les règles établies et traditionnelles de la sculpture. Il ira jusqu’à se l’approprier et en faire une peinture. Chacune de ses créations est le résultat d’un dialogue étroit et complice avec les maîtres-artisans. Attentif au travail des fondeurs, Miró surveille avec minutie l'élaboration de ses bronzes, guide la main des artisans ou crée lui-même sa patine. « Le travail que je réalise avec plusieurs fonderies me donne à chaque fois des nouvelles idées », avait-il déclaré.

Manolo Valdès, Dama de Barajas I, 2004 

Bronze, 22 x 12 x 7 cm. 

© Galerie Maeght, Paris 

Manolo Valdès, Dama de Barajas II, 2004 

Bronze, 18 x 10 x 8,5 cm. 

© Galerie Maeght, Paris 

Manolo Valdès, Dama de Barajas III, 2004 

Bronze, 20,5 x 10,5 x 6,5 cm. 

© Galerie Maeght, Paris 

« Les dames de Barajas » de Manolo Valdès. L’oeuvre de Valdès, que ce soit ses peintures, ses sculptures ou son oeuvre graphique, éveille le toucher. Plus particulièrement avec le bronze, Valdès part à la recherche de textures informelles. Il décide de ne pas polir les défauts de fonte. Il recherche la texture, l’éveil des sens. Conçues comme des icônes qui dialoguent à trois, « Les dames de Barajas » se parlent, se regardent, se répondent. Le bronze devient le support tant de la forme que de la voix. Les personnages, qu’il réalise en taille réelle ou surdimensionnée, sont figés, immobiles, et en même temps, profondément humains. Ils traduisent l’éternité de la matière. Leurs coiffures, volumineuses, étonnantes, renvoient à des expériences plastiques antérieures. La rêveuse, la coquette, la réaliste, les qualifiait l’écrivain Marco Vargas Llosa dans les poèmes accompagnant ce trio de têtes féminines « grands formats » installé dans le nouvel aéroport de Madrid réalisé par Lord Richard Rogers en 2004.

Marco Del Re, Assyrien moderne, 2009. 

Bronze, 110 x 70 x 63 cm. 

© Galerie Maeght, Paris.

« Assyrien moderne » de Marco Del Re offre avec le bronze une nouvelle lecture de son travail. Son oeuvre sculpté est un voyage où se réinventent et se côtoient la tradition classique et le contemporain. Ses bronzes patinés imitent la couleur de la pierre des temples romains et évoquent les héritages grec et étrusque en même temps qu’ils témoignent d’une grande liberté. Escargots de mer, animaux, bateaux de guerre s’y croisent comme autant clins d’oeil à un univers aussi poétique qu’onirique.

La sélection proposée par Isabelle Maeght rassemble plus de cinquante bronzes, de petits comme de grands formats, édités par Maeght Éditeur. Chaque pièce témoigne du soutien sans faille des Maeght aux artistes d’hier et d’aujourd’hui dans leur création.

« C’est aujourd’hui un enjeu pour les artistes contemporain de redécouvrir ce médium. Les pièces les plus récentes qui sont présentées aujourd’hui, avec François Lamore et Nicolas Alquin par exemple, en témoignent », déclare Isabelle Maeght.

Reconnu aujourd’hui comme le plus important éditeur de lithographies et de gravures originales au monde, Maeght Editeur travaille depuis longtemps avec la Fonderie Susse, véritable entreprise du patrimoine vivant au service de la sculpture depuis plus de 200 ans qui a collaboré avec les plus grands : de Matisse à Giacometti, en passant par Miró, Braque, Ubac. L’exposition est l’occasion de mettre en lumière les relations amicales qui ont existé entre eux.

« La Fonderie Susse a depuis toujours bénéficié de notre confiance, de notre passion pour l’art et le bronze. Chaque pièce exposée porte en elle toute cette histoire, ces rapports très étroits avec les artisans et leur savoir-faire », ajoute Isabelle Maeght.

GALERIE MAEGHT
42, rue du Bac
75007 PARIS
www.maeght.com