EXHIBITION AGNÈS THURNAUER "We meet at home"

27 OCTOBER 2022 - 6 FEBRUARY 2023

MUSÉE MATISSE

Curator: Claudine Grammont

In parallel with the historical exhibitions, the Matisse Museum has reintroduced contemporary creation into its programming. This "guest artist" program welcomes in the temporary exhibition space artists who have thought Matisse and his work and conversely allows to take another look at his work. After Claude Viallat in 2018, Frédérique Lucien in 2019 and Noël Dolla in 2021, the museum exhibits Agnès Thurnauer.

In this exhibition, Agnès Thurnauer wanted to focus on the link between illustration and painting, between publishing and painting, which Henri Matisse never stopped working. Practicing writing daily, the artist is also a great reader and the book is often for her the first place of paintings. This attachment particularly resonates with Matisse's work and his conception of the book as an architectural space decompartmentalizing hierarchies and artistic genres.

The exhibition has as its guiding principle the fifty letters that the artist sent to Matisse, between April 2021 and January 2022, after a first visit to the museum. In these writings, Agnès Thurnauer questions several fundamental notions for her, in particular the question of the "states" of painting that Matisse recorded by having his paintings photographed throughout their realization. To these letters responds a long line of Predella – a kind of repetition, echolalia of painting, varying colors and pencils, syllables and hyphenations. As if the pages of the letters were up on the rails.

In Agnès Thurnauer's work, the relationship between writing and painting, between language and forms often leads to echoing the horizontal plane and the vertical plane. Thus these sculptures in the form of molds of letters – the Matrices/Assises installed in front of the large gouache cut Flowers and fruits – sometimes seem to come out of the paintings to offer us a pictorial stroll in space.

The journey continues in the rooms of the permanent collection through a selection of works by the artist that echo the Matissian universe. A special place is given to the illustrated books of Henri Matisse, part of his work still too little known, which the museum wishes to highlight on the occasion of this exhibition.