Exhibition · On view
Matières en présence
GMG galerie presents an exceptional exhibition at Château de la Gaude, bringing together four major figures of modern and contemporary art: César Baldaccini, Tony Cragg, Anselm Kiefer and Hans Hartung.
In a place where architecture, gardens, Provençal light and art naturally converse, the exhibition stages an encounter around material, gesture and transformation. Each work asserts its own singular way of bringing a presence into being — through assemblage, torsion, surface, memory or the energy of the line.
With Marius, César deploys the full power of his sculptural language. An emblematic figure of Nouveau Réalisme, the artist turns bronze into a territory of tension and assemblage, between mechanical force and organic vitality. At once frontal and deeply constructed, the work imposes an immediate physical presence. The accompanying dossier states: Marius, 1997, bronze, cast by Bocquel, signed and numbered 1/8, 130 × 160 × 19 cm.
Facing this intensity, Tony Cragg presents Ghost, a sculpture of shifting, reflective forms. The work seems to capture space as much as it distorts it: the reflections, curves and folds of the metal give rise to an unstable, almost liquid silhouette, somewhere between apparition and disappearance.
With Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr, Anselm Kiefer opens another register: that of memory, landscape and time. Here the painted matter becomes dense and stratified, shot through with autumn, ruins, literature and melancholy. The commonly referenced exact title is “Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr”, a line borrowed from Rilke that Kiefer has taken up in several works.
Finally, a work by Hans Hartung will extend this dialogue through the force of abstract gesture. With Hartung, the line is never decorative: it cuts, vibrates, accelerates. It inscribes in space an energy at once spontaneous and controlled, like pure tension.
Brought together at Château de la Gaude, these works compose a journey in which material becomes language. Bronze, polished metal, thick paint and line answer one another within a single question: how does a work inhabit a place, a gaze, a memory?
This exhibition is presented by GMG galerie, in partnership with Galerie Najuma and Alago Art & Strings GmbH.
