The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will present a major individual exhibition of the work of Monique FRYDMAN, an important French woman artist. Frydman has earned a solid reputation through solo exhibitions at many venues, including the Musee Matisse in France, La Verriere, The Hermes Foundation in Belgium, Passage de Retz in France and group shows like "elles centrepompidou" at the Centre Georges Pompidou in France. This is the first time she has appeared in an exhibition of this kind in a museum in Japan or any other Asian country. Frydman became a practicing artist in the late 1970s. Taking painting as her main form of expression, she has pursued the expression of color and light with a variety of materials, including canvas, pigment, pastels, and paper. The colors and images that emerge from the intimate and interactive dialogue between the artist's body and the materials she uses penetrate the space in which the work is placed and adroitly transform the site. The artistic realm that she creates expresses complex aspects of human awareness and emotion and forms connections with our own memories and bodies. In recent years she has made a number of site-specific installations with such materials as glass, Plexiglas, paper and cloth. In this exhibition, we will present 14 of her works, including three new installations resulting from a dialogue with the architectural space of this museum. Frydrnan unleashes her unique colors and light in the bright, white space of the museum, leaving mysterious reverberations in the space and in our hearts and minds.
Exhibition Features
The First Solo Museum Exhibition of this Highly Respected French Woman Artist in Asia
In recent years, Monique Frydman has presented solo and group exhibitions to great acclaim in many art museums throughout the world. In 2009 she was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor by the French government. In both reputation and quality, she is an excellent representative of the present state of contemporary French art, but her work has not previously been seen on a substantial scale in Japan. This will be the first Frydman exhibition to be held in a museum in Japan or any other Asian country. It is also the first solo exhibition of a French artist at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
An Art of Color and Light in Space that Speaks to the Depths of Human Consciousness
In the process of understanding and expressing color and light with original methodologies and theories of the body, Frydman illuminates complex aspects of human consciousness and emotions and projects them into the space inhabited by the viewer and the artwork. Whatever materials she uses, Frydman's works are strongly and sensitively linked to the memory and awareness of the viewer, filling the exhibition space with the artist's original colors and light, gently guiding as into a different spatial realm.
Kaleidoscope of Light
Utilizing the architecture of the museum, designed by Kazuyo Sejima • Ryue Nishizawa I SANAA, Frydman has explored some other previous concerns in three new pieces. The most dramatic is her response to the glass corridor passing through a courtyard, boldly transforming it into a corridor of light, a Kaleidoscope glowing with more than twenty colors. All three new works will be specially constructed to fit particular spaces in the museum.
Link with the Centre Pompidou
To commemorate the opening of the exhibition, we have planned to present a dialogue between the artist and Camille Morineau, curator of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. A text by Morineau will also appear in the catalogue, to be published in January 2012. Morineau curated the fascinating "elles @centrepompidou" (2009-2011), an exhibition showcasing the work of women artists from the center's collection created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this exhibition, she gave special attention to Frydman's work and expressed her high regard for the artist.
About the Artist
Born in images in the Tarn region of France in 1943. At present, she lives and works in Pans and Senantes, France. She studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She became involved in political activism but in 1974 established a studio in Paris and restarted here art career there. Travels to countries like India, Australia, Amenca, and Japan gave her inspiration from a variety of cultural environments. Frydman has taken the expression of light and color beyond the framework of painting defined in a narrow sense. In recent years, she has produced large installations and undertaken commissioned works that are unified with architecture. Her work has been acquired by the Centre Georges Pompidou (Musee national d'Art Moderne) and other major public collections. Solo exhibitions at the Musee Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambresis, France, in 2006 and La Varriere, The Hermes Foundation in Brussels, Belgium in 2008. She participated In the sensational group show, "elles @ centrepompidou° at the Centre Georges Pompidou. In Japan, she was recently included in the exhibition No Man's Land" held in the old building of the French Embassy in Japan prior to demolition between 2009 and 2010. Frydman received the Order of the Legion of Honor in 2009.
