Exhibitions
75 years: the artists and the museum
Few feelings have such a transformative potential as friendship. The history of the Museum of Ceret is a tangible demonstration of this fact, and this is what is claimed from the exhibition 75 years of friendship, the artists and the museum. Jean-Roch Dumont Saint Priest, curatorial director of the Museum of Modern Art of Ceret, together with Aude Marchand, as associate curator and head of the collection, have wanted to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the museum with an exhibition for which they have selected more than sixty works and documents chosen from the 3,162 that the collection has, with the aim of reaffirming the uniqueness of its history.
Structured in three main areas, the exhibition begins by showing a group of pieces representative of the donations obtained by the museum's first director, the artist Pierre Brune. These are works chosen from those donated to the museum by Henry Matisse and Pablo Picasso in those founding years, and alongside them are exhibited others by August Herbin, Marc Chagall, Valentine Prax, landscapes by Manolo, Albert Marquet, Kremegme and Potzno Glicka and also abstract pieces signed by Jean-Paul Riopelle and Christine Boumeester. This first section ends with works by the artists who succeeded Brune as director of the museum: Frank Burty Haviland, Honoré Marius Berard, Marc Janson.
Representative of the museum's second stage, characterized by organizing large exhibitions, a set of pieces has been chosen among which the presence of Catalan artists such as Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies stands out, as well as others rooted in the south of France such as Dominique Gauthier and Anne-Marie Pêcheur. The piece Pointed Kiss, by Dominique Labauvie, which strikes us with the balance between power and fragility it exudes, and the installation Du simple o double, by Toni Grand, composed of seventeen cylinders of polyester, fiberglass and resin, justify, alone, the visit.
The third area of the exhibition allows us to get an idea of the museum's commitment to contemporary art from Catalonia and the south of France: a piece by Tom Carr in which the landscape around Ceret is recomposed through a game of mirrors; the Ceret Plane , by Josep Riera Aragó, loaded with symbolism and representative of his ironic play around machines devoid of function; the large-format collage by Christian Bonnefoi, which oscillates between painting, drawing and collage , and the Pharmacie Fischer installation, by Hervé Fischer, are courageous proposals that coexist with the sculptures by Alain Clement and the piece Souira nº 2, by Najia Mehadji, which allow us to get an idea of the strength of the exhibitions that have been seen at the museum in recent years.
