Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin jointly present the first American exhibition in half a century devoted to the work of seminal postwar French artist Germaine Richier (1902 – 1959).
On view in the landmark building at 909 Madison Avenue where both galleries reside, Germaine Richier presents more than forty important sculptures ranging from early torsos and figures, to startling hybrids of humans crossed with bats, toads, spiders, and vegetal organisms, that brought the artist international recognition before her untimely death at the age of 57. The exhibition traces the evolution of a defiantly independent vision and the artistic trajectory of a woman whose life was imprinted indelibly by two World Wars; who began her career in the studio of Antoine Bourdelle; and who went on to break convention and leave a vivid mark on the history of Modern art.
The exhibition complements Richier’s sculptures with a selection of photographs by her contemporary Brassaï, who documented the artist’s studio and captured the defying power of her work. Brassaï’s portraits of Richier convey the unique magical chaos of her environment. As depicted in these photographs, Richier surrounded herself with a wild jumble of sculptures spanning different periods of her output -- a veritable sculptural forest that has inspired the installation design for Germaine Richier in New York. Visitors to the exhibition discover there a deliberately dense, nonchronological, and eccentric installation, where sculptures and photographs overflow into the stairwells and draw visitors on a journey into the artist’s world.
Germaine Richier will remain on view through April 12th on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in the same neighborhood where the artist’s first American solo exhibition was presented to broad critical acclaim in 1957 at the legendary Martha Jackson Gallery. The exhibition coincides with a major retrospective of Richier’s work currently on view at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, as well as “Giacometti, Marini, Richier: The Tortured Figure” at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Germaine Richier has been organized with the support of the artist’s family. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, one of the first scholarly studies of the artist’s work ever published in the United States. Researched and edited by Jennifer Buonocore and Clara Touboul, with support from Daphné Valroff, the book features original essays by Sarah Wilson and Anna Swinbourne. It also reproduces a 1953 text by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, never before translated in English, as well as important archival documents from the Germaine Richier Estate.
In addition to works coming from the Germaine Richier Estate, loans from American and European private collections contribute to an in-depth examination of Richier’s oeuvre, which defies easy classification. Germaine Richier explores the daring ways in which Richier’s art bridges the tradition of classical figurative sculpture with an idiosyncratic visual language born of an anguished, searching, and, ultimately, spiritual post-World War psyche.
-Galerie Perrotin
Image: © Germaine Richier
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Perrotin
