Belgian sculptor Catherine François, born in 1963, is renowned for her sometimes monumental bronzes.
If there is one guiding principle in the work of Catherine François over the last ten years, it is a cross, or rather an intersection, a meeting. Catherine François collects intersecting lines. She captures them everywhere, all the time, starting with photographs. She probably has hundreds, perhaps thousands. Encounters – or shocks – are everywhere for those who know how to see them. And Catherine François is a sounding board – paradoxically, she whose silhouette is more reminiscent of a reed in the wind, long and slender. Her apparent fragility hides a great strength, the strength of the nature she listens to, feels and vibrates to. You have to see her apply this strength to bronze, to this forged material, which she sculpts, girdles and polishes.
The Van Buuren Museum has devoted two retrospectives to her work, in 2007 and 2012.
NEWS
Les Bucoliques. Allégorie du vivant, from 06 april to 25 august 2024, Keramis – La Louvière
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris – in the studio of Georges Jeanclos – Valérie Delarue also pursued artistic training in Oackland, USA – in the studio of Viola Frey. She lives and works in Paris and the Yonne region.
Following photographic projects and video-performances on the theme of hair and dance, she returned to sculptural work with ceramics, a field she practices with real virtuosity and which has become a benchmark.
This intimate knowledge of the technical subtleties of the ceramic medium has enabled her to embrace two approaches that have become fundamental to her: that of the energy of the body leaving imprints in the clay, and that of the gestures of creation interpreted as a danced body-in-body with the material. These are all metaphors for vital energy, but also for a personal liberation in which sensuality is important.
“Valérie Delarue’s art consists in resolving conflicting forces into a harmonious whole. Alongside ceramic sculpture, she is renewing a relevant dialogue with drawing, with her dazzling art of pastel, through which she brings to life the dawn of a reconciled world, where human and mineral seem to be able to finally come together in an indistinct unity.”
– Frédéric Bodet, Curator of collections, Art critic, Exhibition curator
Born in 1962, Kuijpers is a Flemish artist, sculptor and designer based in Mechelen.
He is famous for his very pure use of stone and steel. He transforms the most massive and crude of materials into an almost featherweight, taking advantage of their inner qualities to manipulate them. Through his works, Kuijpers shows us the eternity contained in a block of marble, and awakens in us the geological memory that links man to the universe.
“A hunter of stones and poet of recomposed nature, Gerard Kuijpers has designed two veritable mineral ballets for Fontainebleau. Presented in majesty, like so many treasures and precious stones, the Dancing Stones seem to defy the laws of gravity and escape the earth’s attraction with their swing. Their asteroid dance imbues their surroundings with wonder. Taken from active European quarries, they evoke both the art of building and the poetry of ruins, lending the garden an almost magical atmosphere.” Jean Marc Dimanche, p. 26, BeauxArts Magazine, Hors série, May 2023.
A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in the late 1970s, Patrice Giorda soon began exhibiting in French and foreign galleries and institutions. Since the 1980s, his works have been part of the most important national collections in France, including the Centre Pompidou.
In his painting, powerful and contrasted, where the golden light builds the space of the canvas, the symbolic representation of nature or man goes beyond simple landscapes, scenes, portraits or still lifes: reality is enriched by the memory and permanence of a quest that Giorda qualifies as “digging of the being”. He attunes the untunable: the dazzling beauty of light and color, and the depth of the shadows of solitude.
Galerie La Forest Divonne represents Patrice Giorda’s work from 2023. The first solo show took place in Paris from May 11 to July 8, 2023.
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Grand Manège de Vendôme, solo show, from July 05 to September 22sd 2024
Born in 1958, Guy de Malherbe lives and works between Paris and the Sarthe.
His work is part of national collections in France (CNAP, Ministries of Foreign Affairs), where many museums have devoted solo exhibitions to him, including the Musée du Mans, the Musée d’Évreux, the Musée de Trouville, the Abbaye de l’Épau and the Châtreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.
Many art historians have written about his work, including Olivier Kaeppelin, Pierre Wat, Alain Bonfand, Claude Frontisi, Olivier Delavallade and writers Franck Maubert, Patrick Cloux and poet Luis Mizón. They are often interested in the Surrealist roots of his work, influenced from an early stage by the landscapes of Cadaqués and the worlds of Dalí and Buñuel. Deeply rooted in the material and in the pleasure of painting, Malherbe’s work is also revealed by these authors as a very dense intellectual painting, full of references to the history of art and nourished by the subconscious.
nourished by the subconscious.
For him, painting is about establishing oneself as a body in the world, realising oneself through experience, through the action of one’s own body, which constructs both the reality of a painting and its fictional dimension. Over the years, his painting has evolved into an increasingly expressive and free art, in which matter and gesture take centre stage, around the recurring motif of rocks, bodies – asleep or fragmented – and cliffs.
French artist, born in 1946, who is a painter, sculptor and designer. In the 1970s, he designed furniture for Pierre Cardin and created the acronym for his famous «Espace», where the great couturier regularly exhibited his work.
Cante Pacos innovated and experimented with all the new materials that inspired his creativity: plastic, resin, polyester, etc. He was commissioned to create monumental sculptures for the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Gare Montparnasse, the modern towers of the La Défense business district, etc. Numerous galleries show his work and exhibit it at major fairs and events (Australia, France, New Zealand, Mexico, Germany, USA, etc.).
In the world of design, it was in 2018 that he reshuffled the deck by producing furniture designed in the 1970s but never built before. We are rediscovering Cante Pacos the designer, and all the success that his furniture had already achieved a few decades earlier under the Cardin banner. His creations are both contemporary and timeless, in tune with the times and rooted in the tradition of the great cabinet-makers. With the added bonus that they are the work of a sculptor and a poet: their shapes intrigue and touch us, mysterious, sensual and attractive, halfway between jewellery and sculpture.
