Documentation
Curated by:
Claudine Grammont
In addition to its historical exhibitions, the musée Matisse has launched its Guest Artist Program to re-introduce contemporary art in its programming. Artists who explore Matisse’s work and bring new perspective to his art are invited to present their work in the museum’s temporary exhibition space. After focusing on Claude Viallat in 2018, Frédérique Lucien in 2019 and Noël Dolla in 2021, the museum is hosting an Agnès Thurnauer show in 2022.
In this exhibition, Agnès Thurnauer wishes to explore the link which Henri Matisse never stopped working on between illustration and painting, the book and the canvas. Writing every day, Agnès Thurnauer is a great reader, and her paintings often proceed from books. This attachment resonates with Matisse’s work and his conception of the book as an architectural space that challenges the hierarchies and compartmentalisation of artistic genres.
The fifty letters the artist wrote to Matisse beween April 2021 and January 2022, after her first visit to the museum, form the common thread running through the exhibition. In this correspondence, Agnès Thurnauer discusses notions which are key to her, examining more particularly the question raised by Matisse’s decision to have the different « states » of his paintings photographed to document their evolution as he painted them. Echoing these letters, a long line of Prédelles (predella) for each of which the artist has used different colours, pencils, syllables and splits in the painted words, acts as a sort of repetition or echolalia of painting. As if the pages of Agnès Thurnauer’s letters to Matisse had been hung on picture rails.
In Agnès Thurnauer’s work, the relationship between writing and painting, language and forms, often leads to a dialogue between the horizontal plane and the vertical plane as illustrated by her Matrices/Assises. Displayed in front of Matisse’s monumental cut-out Fleurs et fruits, these sculptures are based on moulds used to create three-dimensional letters of the alphabet. It sometimes seems as if they had exited the artist’s paintings to invite us to take a pictorial stroll in space.
The next section of the exhibition sparks a dialogue between a selection of works by Agnès Thurnauer and the permanent collection, showing how they fit in the Matissian world. Special emphasis is placed on Matisse’s illustrated books, a part of his work which is still largely unknown and which the museum wishes to highlight on the occasion of this exhibition.
Catalogue of the exhibition: Agnès Thurnauer, “Cher Henri, correspondances avec Matisse”, Paris, Bernard Chauveau éditions, 2022, 144 p. – 25 €
Bilingual French-English edition
