Her works in bronze and silk will be exhibited throughout Paris until January 2025. Barbara Chase-Riboud will have waited fifty years since her first personal exhibition in Paris, in 1974, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, before this belated recognition. During this “eclipse” of half a century – apart from an exhibition at the Giacometti Foundation in Paris (from October 2021 to January 2022) – the native of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), who is now 85 years old, will have built three works in parallel and alternately, as a novelist, poet and sculptor. Today he returns with force with an exhibition that seems like a treasure hunt for art lovers, since under a unique name, “When a knot is untied, a god is freed”, taken from one of his poetry collections. It presents around forty works in eight important national institutions.
This artistic “grand slam” is a multifaceted update, because the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud, by covering a very extensive cultural history of art, allows her to find her rightful place in collections that are, however, very diverse. . She participates in the upcoming transition to rebalance a historical underrepresentation of women and non-white artists in Paris, especially since she herself has always been committed to the visibility of black figures of the past. From hieratic monuments to stelae covered in red, black or gold, his style is immediately recognizable for its hybridizations, between the rigidity of metal and the fluidity of textile elements, which invert the contradictions hard-soft, figurative-abstract, masculine-feminine. , Western-non-Western or power-impotence, creating alchemies between greatness and fragility.
This alignment of the planets comes immediately after the exhibition at the Giacometti Foundation, where his work was put in dialogue with that of the Swiss sculptor, whom he was able to meet in his studio in Montparnasse and who was his first great influence in sculpture. The exhibition, which traveled to MoMA in New York in 2023, generated an international spark, with, since then, a series of major exhibitions, from the Serpentine Gallery in London to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Saint-Louis (Missouri) in the United States and soon in Germany and China.
In Paris, where she has lived since her marriage to the photographer Marc Riboud (1923-2016) in the early 1960s, this is nothing less than the first exhibition in several museums to be presented during the lifetime of an artist. “It all started from a conversation with Laurence des Cars [présidente du Louvre] and Laurent Le Bon [président du Centre Pompidou] about celebrations of deceased artists. We asked ourselves the question of passing on a living artist who had not been the subject of a celebration commensurate with her importance.”specifies Donatien Grau, contemporary programs advisor at the Louvre Museum and general co-curator of the exhibition together with the American Erin Jenoa Gilbert, specialist in the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud.
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