« L’art de la rencontre » [The Art of Encounter] brings together works by major artists of the 20th and 21st centuries: Baya, Sidival Fila, Camille Henrot, Anish Kapoor, Alicja Kwade, Lee Ufan, Joan Mitchell, François Morellet, Judit Reigl and Ugo Rondinone. Although most of them may have never met in their lifetime, all their works, in their own way, question our vision of and our relationship with the world, in the midst of an elusive nature. Produced between the mid-1960s and 2024, the paintings and sculptures presented here form a mental landscape that echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908-1961) phenomenology of perception, which Lee Ufan invokes in his writings to evoke the revolution in seeing that results from this simultaneous interweaving of the world, our gaze and the gaze of the work.
In the first room, Lee Ufan’s Correspondance questions both the presence and absence of space in painting, while one of Anish Kapoor’s famous concave mirrors inverts the reflection of the world alongside Ugo Rondinone’s basalt ‘nuns’, frozen in eternal meditation. Inspired by the beauty of nature’s colours, Joan Mitchell nurtures the idea of ‘abstract impressionism’, echoing the late work of Claude Monet: the same movement between figuration and abstraction, between exterior and interior, is also evident in the work of Judit Reigl, who thinks of the movement of a river, referring to the words of Heraclitus that ‘everything flows’, to create, in music, her Déroulement. As with Mitchell, chromatic abundance pervades the dreamlike figuration of Baya’s gardens, which echo the orange grove built on the ruins of a house that inspired Camille Henrot to immortalize the spiral of an orange peel. Sidival Fila, Alicja Kwade and François Morellet use fragments of trees to play with materiality and evoke the passage of time—Sidival Fila’s vine branch is covered in old nineteenth-century linen, Alicja Kwade’s trunk is petrified—while François Morellet ‘clings to the branches’, inventing the ‘geometree’. Finally, the last room reveals a large landscape between sky and sea by Ugo Rondinone, inspired by the sublime of German Romanticism, and opens onto a final mystery of vision, Anish Kapoor’s Non-Object Black.
Lives and works in Rome, Italy
Lives and works in New York, United States
Lives and works in London, England
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Lives and works in Paris and Kamakura, Japan
Died in 2016 in Cholet, France
Died in 2020 in Marcoussis, France
Lives and works in New York, United States