John Levee : exposition envolée d’un aviateur américain
27 November 2008 – 10 January 2009
The most French of American artists in Paris, where he has lived and worked since 1949. A painter of synthesis, he is one of the most significant representatives of the New School of Paris. Defining himself as “a vertical landscaper”, he pursues with lucidity and rigor a path initiated in lyrical abstraction to evolve towards a subtle synthesis between matter and drawing, rhythm of forms, color and light in structured compositions, where softness and violence alternate, those of a nature at the heart of his painting.
Lydia Harambourg, 2008
Artist exhibited :
John Levee.
Klaus Staudt : sculptures et reliefs
23 October – 25 November 2008
If white is the reference color for Klaus Staudt, the works in color evoke a subtle burst that declines the color chosen by his reflection on geometric modules cleverly arranged that the gaze and the distance modify according to the light. Staudt plays with transparency, translucency.
Whether they are clear or diffuse, these works are, he says, “metaphors of light, space and movement.”
Artist exhibited :
Klaus Staudt.
Jan Meyer-Rogge, sculptures et Knut Navrot, peintures
18 September – 21 October 2008
… gezeiten (tides) is the title of a group of works by Jan Meyer-Rogge from his previous cycle stillwasser (still water). These names, while in no way designating the representation of a natural phenomenon, are nevertheless more than a simple metaphor. They announce an analogy – sculptures put in a state of stillwasser – at once a point between movement and rest and a point of extreme tension, a collision of forces where no direction predominates. This cycle and the entire work of the visual artist precisely target this phenomenon and the aesthetic consequences that result from it.
Lothar Romain, excerpt from the opening speech of the exhibition Jan Meyer-Rogge, sculptures at the Karl-Ernst-Osthause Museum, Hagen, 2003
Knut Navrot says he wants to take painting back to its origins and practice an art without reference. To achieve this, he seeks to identify the elements specific to painting that would only refer to themselves. He implements them according to clear principles, the different possibilities of which he experiments with, the system interesting him at least as much as its result.
As singular as it claims to be, Knut Navrot’s approach is not isolated: it is perfectly in line with the 1930 manifesto of concrete art and the ideas of Theo van Doesburg, as well as the statements of Ad Reinhardt.
Serge Lemoine, excerpt from the introduction to the monograph published for the exhibition, Paris, 2008.
Artists exhibited :
Knut Navrot, Jan Meyer-Rogge.
nos choix de l’été
31 July – 6 September 2008
During the summer, the gimpel & müller gallery exhibits works by Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Victor Vasarely, Marino di Teana…
as well as “gallery artists”: Léon Zack, Eve Gramatzki, Hans Steinbrenner, Guy de Lussigny, Joan Palà, Denise Lioté, Alan Davie.<br>We also present the artists of the next seasons: Knut Navrot, Jan Meyer- Rogge, Klaus Staudt, René Guiffrey, Yvon Mutrel, John Levee, Gudrun Piper, Karin Radoy, Friedhelm Tschentscher, Didier Bergerol, Irène Zack, Albert Irvin.
Great discoveries in perspective…
Alan Davie : L’énigme du chamane
5 June – 29 July 2008
…] we find in his recent paintings this unchanging “joie de vivre” so characteristic of his painting but Alan Davie, soon to be ninety, succeeds today in confronting his deep convictions with increasingly frequent questioning and his tireless dynamism with this certainty that we are all mortal. […]
James Hyman, art historian, 2008
Artists exhibited :
Alan Davie.
Denise Lioté et Joan Palà : Peintures et Pastels – Sculptures
24 April – 3 June 2008
“… a dilated light that hollows out space, for an impalpable reality, a false monochrome, whose fluidity introduces its own laws of refraction. Faced with this quivering surface, similar to a swell on which the intervention of a range of pink, blue, or ochre and white introduces imperceptible simultaneous zones of shadow and light, our eye undertakes an exploration in a moment of internalized meditation…”
Lydia Harambourg, 2006, art historian, correspondent of the institute
… Joan Palà is one of the rare sculptors working in France who benefited from the dual knowledge of American minimal art and constructed concrete art as it developed after the last war in Europe. His position is singular; with minimal art, the artist shares simple and geometric volumes; with concrete art, he defends the idea that the work is only worth something in itself as an objective reality, independently of any referential system…”
Christophe Duvivier, 1996, director of the Pontoise museums
Artists exhibited :
Denise Lioté, Joan Palà.
Hans Steinbrenner (1928 -2008) : Peintures et Sculptures
13 March – 22 April 2008
Hans Steinbrenner had begun with an approach based on figuration. Daily work, outside of fashions, but analyzing the successes and failures of his predecessors, led him to the very heart of a system of abstract forms. He speaks of “plastic events”, which lead him to a completely free architectonic form. In painting as in sculpture, this caesura, which seems brutal, allows the emergence of the work in all its maturity. That of plenitude, that where the painted Compositions, whatever their format, the Figures, beyond the hardness of the material, follow one another, respond to one another, constitute sequences – quasi-musical movements. A constructed, non-systematic art asserts itself. […] Lyrical and abstract forms have given way to geometric and
architectonic forms […].
Marie Lapalus – Mâcon 2001
Artist exhibited :
Hans Steinbrenner.
Eve Gramatzki (1935 – 2003) : Œuvres sur papier
7 February – 11 March 2008
…With her discreet pigments and graphite leads, she tried to relearn something that no one can teach anyone: how to capture a vibration, how to hold the place of the breath. One must look closely at the surfaces that she worked patiently, sometimes until the eye is exhausted, to observe the simplicity of the line. This simplicity is never poor, it does not indicate any weakness of the composition, since it is not a question of composing but of treating visuality in its relationship to existence. This simplicity participates in a radical attitude towards art to put an end to the old divorce between the physical and the mental, between action and contemplation…”
Anne Tronche, Preface (extract) from the catalogue of the exhibition Eve Gramatzki October 15 – December 31, 2005 at the Musée des Ursulines, Mâcon.
Artist exhibited :
Eve Gramatzki.
Guy de Lussigny (1929 – 2001) : « Noir – Blanc – Rouge »
13 December 2007 – 5 February 2008
A mystery reigns around Guy de Lussigny’s paintings. Like the whispered testimony of an inner adventure, almost a mystical experience. He only needs to decline the simplest geometric form – the square – and play on the most imperceptible chromatic oppositions, to expand his pictorial works, to raise them to the rank of a true universe, where it is less a question of picking, of seeking happiness elsewhere, than of meditating, of finding oneself.
Frédéric Vitoux of the Académie Française
Artist exhibited :
Guy de Lussigny.
