JACQUES MONORY

March 28 - June 14, 2020

In 2020, the Maeght Foundation will present two exceptional exhibitions, entrusted to guest curators, around artists from its collection. In the spring, the artist Jacques Monory will be in the spotlight, from March 28 to June 14, with his first major monographic exhibition since his death in October 2018. An exhibition that revisits sixty years of the career of the most narrative painter of the Narrative Figuration movement.

Guest curator: Laurence d'Ist, art historian, author and curator of exhibitions.

From March 28 to June 14, 2020, the Maeght Foundation is offering Jacques Monory's first monographic exhibition since his death in 2018 and pays tribute to him. Entitled simply "James Monory", the exhibition presents sixty years of career and revisits the work of this major figure of narrative Figuration, constantly stretched by modernity and by the singularity of this blue that made him famous. Organized by Laurence d'Ist, curator of the exhibition, this crossing takes place along a non-chronological route, but which tries to make play full, from one room to another, the echoes and gaps of this singular work that it is time to revisit.

Of all the so-called painters of Narrative Figuration, Monory may have been the only one to be fully narrative. Sometimes hyperrealistic, the enigmatic scenes he paints and juxtaposes form like the haunted logbook of a painter who every day wonders about the reality of the world. The blue that made it famous, whether it is monochrome, or whether it welcomes other colors of the spectrum, is the color of this doubt. It acts as a dreamlike veil and as a distance.

Borrowing from the cinema, including the thrillers of the fifties, such as photography and imagery, Monory's paintings, which are frequently large in large format and often include objects, form a kind of fast-track merry-go-round, sometimes with almost ecstatic stases: alternate or combine urban landscapes and large expanses of nature, romantic visions and dramatic images from current events or contemporary history. A fundamental pessimism, tinged with squeaky humour, coexists there with a fascination for emptiness.

Monory does not teach a lesson, he asks and asks us: how to live in a violent, unreasonable, illogical, surprising and often false world? His painting, which echoes a modernity whose violence he wards off by giving it free rein, returns to us today in the face, like a very feature film whose own film we would like to be able to isolate each shot while getting carried away by the power of a m ruthless.

Timetables

The Maeght Foundation is open every day:
September-June: 10am-6pm
July-August: 10am-7pm
Closed at 4pm on December 24 and 31.
Last admission 1/2 hour before closing.
Exceptional closure possible.

RATES

Full price: €16
Reduced price: 11 euros (Groups of 10 people, children 10 to 18 students, the press, lecturer guides. NB: a proof will be provided asked).
Free: children under 10, people with disabilities and members of the Society of Friends

Audioguides adults and children French/English/Italian: 3

Between two temporary exhibitions, some rooms may be closed to the public. The rate is reduced accordingly.

Private foundation that does not receive any public grants for how it works, the Maeght Foundation is self-financing resources mainly through entry fees.

PLEASE FOR ALL SPECIFIC DEMANDES