Louis Soutter
the tremor of modernity
Didier Vermeiren
sculptures – photographies
Luka Fineisen
fluide parfait
21 June–23 September 2012
la maison rouge
fondation antoine de galbert
10 Bd de la Bastille 75012
Paris, France
Louis Soutter, the tremor of modernity
Louis Soutter, the tremor of modernity proposes a broad and representative view of the work of Swiss artist Louis Soutter (1871–1942). Unjustly unknown to the public at large, he was for decades neglected by art historians.
Because Soutter spent the last twenty years of his life cut off from the world, forcibly admitted to an old people’s home, commentators have been inclined to label his work Art Brut. However, important aspects of his life have been overlooked: his studies of art and music that took him to Geneva, Brussels, and Paris; his wide-ranging culture; and his knowledge of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century art.
More than 250 works have been assembled—many from the collections of the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, but also from private collections which are rarely shown in public—to present each period in Soutter’s work. His singular and marginal output, though produced in such a self-contained environment, echoes stylistic developments among contemporaries such as Georges Rouault and is instilled with a modernity that would leap out at later generations of artists, such as Arnulf Rainer.
Curated by Julie Borgeaud.
With the support of Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne and Prohelvetia.
Didier Vermeiren, sculptures – photographies
In all his work, Didier Vermeiren (b. 1951, Brussels) questions the tradition of sculpture and its possibilities today. He belongs to a generation of artists who, since the 1970s and drawing on the legacy of conceptual art, minimalism, and history, have been instrumental in redefining the dialectic of art.
While many of Didier Vermeiren’s sculptures make reference to works by other sculptors, they also refer back and forth to each other. A sculpture is always one stage in a continuity and a response to an earlier work. As such, they are all connected, and form a coherent and prolific whole. In each of his exhibitions, Didier Vermeiren establishes a dialogue between recent and older works, each time allowing new links to emerge between the different sculptures. Thus every exhibition looks both backwards and forwards. Some of these sculptures, all representative of Didier Vermeiren’s oeuvre, are being shown at la maison rouge. The artist has taken advantage of the layout of la maison rouge by choosing two groups of works for two galleries which face each other on separate levels. The nine large pieces which the artist will present in the upper gallery are his most recent work (2007–2010), shown for the first time in France. They will centre around two studies: Etude pour la Pierre and Etude pour l’Urne. The second gallery will show a group of seven plaster sculptures – what we might call his sculptures retournées or overturned sculptures (1995–1999)—and 32 black-and-white photographs, taken in the studio in 1998, of a work from the same period (Cariatide à la Pierre [1997]).
Luka Fineisen, fluide parfait
Each year, Friends of La Maison Rouge invites an artist to produce a work for the courtyard. The young German artist Luka Fineisen has been chosen this year. Using foam, Fineisen will present an ambitious installation that explores the possibilities of movement and evanescence within the context of monumental sculpture.
*Image above:
Louis Soutter, Le colis froid, 1938. © Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts.
