6 March 2024
1 July 2024
The Musée de l'Orangerie is devoting an exhibition to the American artist Robert Ryman (1930-2019). Named « Le regard en acte » (The act of looking), this first large-scale presentation of the painter's work on in a French public institution since 1981 confirms the artist's historical importance five years after his death. Too often equated with the American minimalist movement (with which it usually...
The Musée de l'Orangerie, which harbors Claude Monet's ultimate masterpiece, the Nymphéas, is a venue well suited to this reinterpretation. Ryman, who rejected the notion of influence and the idea of exhibiting in dialogue with another artist, nonetheless has his place in the history of painting, by calling each of its aspects and fundamentals into question. Like Monet before him, he focused, almost obsessively, on his medium's specificities, examining notions of surface, the work's limit, the space into which it is incorporated, the light it plays with, and the duration in which it is deployed.
Curatorship
Claire Bernardi, Director of the Musée de l'Orangerie, with the collaboration of Guillaume Fabius, Assistant Curator