Robert Frank, a Foreign Look
Paris / The Americans
Sophie Ristelhueber
Mario García Torres :
“Il aurait bien pu le promettre aussi”
January 20 – March 22, 2009
1, place de la Concorde
Paris 75008
France
Paris / The Americans
Curated by Ute Eskildsen and Marta Gili
Robert Frank created a new style of photography in which poetry, literature and painting come together in a subjective language that nevertheless takes on board the heritage of documentary photography.
This exhibition at Jeu de Paume proposes a new and original dialogue between two series by Robert Frank: it features a selection of photographs from his Paris series chosen by himself and Ute Eskildsen, curator at the Museum Folkwang, Essen. Marta Gili, Director of Jeu de Paume, also wanted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the French and American publication of his seminal and controversial book The Americans, by showing all its 83 photographs, lent specially by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
PARIS (1949–1952)
These 79 photographs of Paris show clearly that Frank’s vision of European cities had acquired a new edge as a result of his experience of the New World. When he returned to Europe, after this American stay, Paris was the city where he felt the Old World atmosphere most acutely. But far from wallowing in romanticism, the photographs he took there are full of striking contrasts.
THE AMERICANS (1955/1956)
The Americans was the result of over a year of travels around the United States. Between April 1955 and June 1956, Frank took his wife Mary and their two children with him on a photographic journey involving several expeditions from New York and a nine-month journey along the West Coast.
An impassive observer, Frank forged a personal aesthetic in these images infused with sadness and a sense of mystery. What made it both new and significant was the fact that Frank organised its contents in sequences, applying the principles of cinematographic montage to fixed images.
Exhibition produced by Museum Folkwang (Essen), Jeu de Paume (Paris), in collaboration with Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris).
Sophie Ristelhueber
Curated by the artist with Marta Gili
For the first major exhibition of Sophie Ristelhueber in France, Jeu de Paume will present a number of her series – “Beirut,” “Vulaines,” “Fact,” “Eleven Blowups” — together. Themes such as the perturbation of memory, the insanity of power and the obscenity of human suffering are explored in her images but rather in relation to their discreet inscription in the inexorable process of life than from the angle of fatality or excess. Two new films are also presented, one of them specially conceived for the show.
Sophie Ristelhueber (born 1949) lives in Paris and she has been working on the notion of the territory and its history in a new approach of documentary photography, for more than twenty years now. She pays special attention to ruins and all kind of traces left by man in places devastated by war. Working far from conventional photojournalism, she focuses on revealing events and the marks of history, both on bodies and on landscapes.
Satellite Programme
Curated by María Inés Rodríguez
Mario García Torres: “Il aurait bien pu le promettre aussi”
In his work called ” Il aurait bien pu le promettre aussi” (He might as well have promised it), Mario García gradually puts together a personal mythology whose most striking feature is its meticulously assembled collection of notes, projects, images, etc., presented with great formal sobriety, which plays on the registers of document and fiction.
Mexican artist Mario García Torres (born 1975) was one of the revelations of the last Venice Biennale. He revisits the history of conceptual art and his work has involved constructing narratives based on rereadings and interpretations of works created or imagined by others. García Torres seeks to question the nature of art and to explore a history whose protagonists include John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt and Robert Barry.
The Jeu de Paume receives a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
It gratefully acknowledges support from Neuflize Vie, its global Partner.
