Tribute to François Morellet

Maine-et-Loire Departmental Council and the Château de Montsoreau will pay a joint tribute to François Morellet, the father of minimalism, who died earlier this year. Following the tribute that took place on November 7 at the Pompidou Centre, it is the turn of the Anjou region and the Château de Montsoreau to recognise the Cholet-born artist whose international reputation brought French Art worldwide recognition.

François Morellet’s oeuvre is intimately bound up with the history of Conceptual art, which forms the basis of the collection at the Château de Montsoreau. After creating the Prix François Morellet in April 2016 in collaboration with the Departmental Council and the Journées Nationales du Livre et du Vin, the Château de Montsoreau, the Loire Valley’s newest contemporary art museum, is putting the spotlight on the oeuvre of François Morellet by installing a work on the façade of the building that houses its temporary exhibitions. A showing of the film Des Intégrations by Thierry Spitzer, with Danielle and Frédéric Morellet in attendance, will provide an opportunity to reflect on the artist’s role.

A work of art in tribute
In collaboration with Danielle and Frédéric Morellet, a work titled Courbe contrainte au porte-à-porte, a curve created with lemon-yellow adhesive tape running across the five French windows on the outside of the building that houses temporary exhibitions, will be installed on December 13, 2016. François Morellet began creating temporary sticker art in 1969, starting at the Galerie Swart in Amsterdam and going on to install stickers directly on the walls of iconic buildings such as the Musée Galliera in Paris (1971), the Kunstverein in Hamburg (1971), the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble (1972) and the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden (1977). In 1954, François Morellet completed Arc de cercle brisé en 4, his first oil painting on four wooden panels, which was to become a highly representative principle of his systems. In 1980 at Duizel in the Netherlands, François Morellet applied this principle to architecture too, on a collection of buildings in Fragmentation de droites et de courbes de néon. Using this same principle which was so dear to the artist, Courbe contrainte au porte à porte makes a connection between the different surfaces on which the work features and also creates one or more lines over the whole space. The surfaces covered by the work are then separated, only to move back to their initial positions (or actual positions in the case of architecture).

François Morellet, the father of Minimalism
A painter, engraver and sculptor, François Morellet is regarded as one of the major figures in geometrical abstract art of the second half of the 20th century. The precursor of systematic painting in France, his work follows on from the geometrical and Constructivist art movements. Morellet’s view was that a work of art refers only to itself. His aim was to control the process of artistic creation and to demystify the romantic mythology surrounding art and the artist. Through his strict application of the notions of geometry, over the years he developed a spatial approach, placing him in the avant-garde of Concrete art and Minimal art. An international artist working in a wide variety of media (painted canvas, adhesive tape, neon tubing, building surfaces, etc.), by the 1970s he had earned a prestigious reputation in France, Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States, receiving a large number of public and private commissions.