calendario eventi  :: 

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30/6/2008

Two exhibitions

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Richard Avedon, Photographs 1946 - 2004

Organised by the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek with the cooperation of the Richard Avedon Foundation, this exhibition surveys the whole of Richard Avedon's career, starting with his first steps as a fashion photographer at the end of the Second World War.
Avedon continued to photograph the creations of the big Parisian couture houses up until 1984, working first for Harper's Bazaar and then for Vogue. Finding fashion photography too static and stuffy, he transformed it by introducing movement and photographing his models in public spaces.
He also made many portraits of celebrities from the worlds of literature, art and show business, always taking care to shatter the icon in order to reveal the true personality behind the public image.

In the 1960s, Avedon also ventured into photojournalism, covering such hot subjects as Civil Rights campaigners in the American South (1963), the Ku Klux Klan, patients in a mental hospital and the Vietnam war — both in the country itself, where he photographed military officers and napalm victims, and back home, where, a pacifist himself, he covered the hippie protests against the war.

In 1974 Avedon exhibited a series of his father, then dying of cancer, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this decade he continued his fashion photography and reportage, and also produced a series of 73 portraits of America's political elite for Rolling Stone.

The early 1980s saw Avedon produce a long series of 700 portraits of middle class and poor Americans from the 17 western states. As if to refute the myth of the American West, these portraits, all taken outdoors against a white ground, show closed, tense and introverted faces with an intense but subjacent emotional power. At the end of the decade, a commission from the French magazine Égoïste gave Avedon the chance to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Exhibition organised by the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Denmark) and the Jeu de Paume, Paris, with the cooperation of the Richard Avedon Foundation, New York and the support of the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre.

“Avedon” / Talk by Bernard Blistène, art critic and curator.
Friday 4 July at 7 pm
Registration: +33 (0)1 47 03 12 41 / serviceculturel@jeudepaume.org

Richard Avedon. Photographs 1946 - 2004
Tuesday 1 July at 7 pm
Tour of the exhibition with Norma Stevens, director of The Richard Avedon Foundation, and Marta Gili, director of the Jeu de Paume.

”Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light” (Helen Whitney, 1995, 87’, colour and black and white, in English with French subtitles)
Tuesday to Sunday at 12.30 pm, 2 pm, 3.30 pm, 5 pm

Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957, 103’, color, in English with French subtitles).
Tuesday 8 July at 7 pm
Film introduced by Bernard Bénoliel, from the Cinémathèque Française.

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Virginie Yassef: The Second Started First

Exhibition curator: Fabienne Fulchéri

The fourth and last part of “Playgrounds,” the Satellite programme curated by Fabienne Fulchéri, is dedicated to Virginie Yassef, a French artist born in 1970. In her project for the Jeu de Paume, she questions the role of the body in the exhibition space, through video, sculptures and installations. In collaboration with visual artists and a composer, she experiments with stage design collaboration, by questioning the ambiguous relations between high art and popular art, the logic of mass production and artistic creation.

Virginie Yassef (born 1970 in Grasse) makes videos, photographs and sculptures that seem to draw on the real world. However, when seen by this artist, everyday actions and simple situations take on a new dimension. In installations that regularly encourage visitor participation, she is presenting a set of works that combine reality and science fiction while exploring the systems of production of art, design and industry.

In the mezzanine space the artist reinterprets the work entitled Alloy. In this installation, a video accompanied by a strange, otherworldly soundtrack shows a child playing with magnetic elements and assembling them in a random manner, thus creating precariously balanced edifices. One of the elements from this strange building kit appears abruptly in the exhibition space, like a hypertrophied brain. Yassef plays on scale and presents a sculpture that it is impossible to apprehend at first glance. Is it a rock, a meteorite or a spaceship? This unidentifiable object partakes of an oneiric narrative that is grounded in a remote reality. Using elements from such diverse worlds as literature, cinema and the daily press, the artist manages to create enigmatic, anachronistic situations that transport us into the world and mysteries of childhood.

An elephant in the foyer space constitutes the heart of the installation. Conceived specially for the exhibition, this work explores the ambiguous relations between sculpture and architecture, between high art and popular art. This structure, which seems to have come out of a theatre set, evokes the emblematic figure of the Trojan horse. Sounds (created by Giancarlo Vulcano) coming out of the animal’s entrails suggest the possible presence of a hidden workshop.

Conceived as both an autonomous artwork and a habitable space, the work is presented within a larger installation constituted by chairs reproducing the Crate Chair that the Dutch designer, architect and cabinetmaker Gerrit Rietveld designed in 1934. Conceived so that it could be delivered in kit form and then easily assembled by the buyer, for Rietveld this model symbolised the shifting of mass production back to the artisanal phase. Yassef appropriates this process by constructing the chair using the same materials (pine planks and brass screws) and following the same instructions as for the original. However, the artist does more than simply reappropriate the object, because she reintroduces it into the artistic field and accentuates its status as prototype and artwork. Based on dialogue, Yassef’s exhibition set-up is further enriched by collaborations with the artists Julien Bismuth, Rita McBride and Camila Oliveira Fairclough.

Exhibition organized with the support of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques
The Jeu de Paume receives a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
It gratefully acknowledges support from Neuflize Vie, its global partner.

Press contact: Eva Bechman
T 00 33 (0)1 42368622 evabechmann@free.fr

Image: Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 6 mars 1958. Photographie Richard Avedon © 2008 the Richard Avedon Foundation

Jeu de Paume – Concorde
1, place de la Concorde
75008 PARIS
Tuesday : noon - 9 pm
Wednesday to Friday : noon - 7 pm
Saturday and Sunday : 10 am - 7 pm

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