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Hockney meeting Matisse illuminates the Nice Biennale

Flowers are the theme of the new edition of the Biennale des arts de Nice. The Matisse Museum is taking the opportunity to offer a cross-exhibition between the modern painter and the British artist David Hockney, who come together in their quest for radiant light. Henri Matisse, Interior with Black Fern , Vence, 1948, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, Fondation Beyeler. © Estate of H. Matisse - Photo Robert Bayer.
David Hockney, 15th March 2021 , painting on ipad, collection of the artist.
© David Hockney It takes well over two years today to organize a large-scale Matisse exhibition by borrowing works by the master from public and private collections, explains the director of the Matisse Museum. However, this does not mean that this improvised dialogue with Hockney is an easy solution, nor that it was desired; quite the contrary. “Every time I see a work by David Hockney, I think of Matisse,” says Claudine Grammont, who had dreamed for several years of creating this encounter, for which she worked with the David Hockney Foundation and with the artist who lives today for most of his time in Normandy. His "Fresh Flowers" first imposed themselves as obvious, given the theme of the Biennale des arts niçoise. These bouquets of flowers made on iPad, the latest in a series that began more than ten years ago, constitute the outcome, since Hockney has now stopped this type of research. At the Matisse Museum, around twenty prints on paper from 2021 resulting from inkjet printing are lined up in ornate wooden frames from which he bought a stock, seduced by their old-fashioned style contrasting with the aesthetics digital. Can these digital still lifes be compared to Matisse's cut-out gouache papers? No doubt, because in both cases, the exercise testifies to a taste for experimentation and seriality. Presence of the body at work At the bend of a room, a video invites you to watch the accelerated recording of the iPad screen on which David Hockney makes two "Fresh Flowers", in March and April 2021. The demonstration is, at sure, very fun. However, we are waiting to get to the heart of the matter: painting. This first proceeds, if we follow the logic of the exhibition, from a question of perception. The questioning of traditional perspective is at the origin of several works by the British artist in the 1980s, in particular his photo-collages, recalls Claudine Grammont. One of them, Sitting in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple , where we can guess his posture, legs crossed, hangs at the start of the route where he neighbors with Paysage de Saint-Tropez (1904), drawing in which Matisse introduces his hand and foot into the landscape, as well as the sheet on which he sketches. Presence of the body at work, transience of the moment. In the interview published in the catalog, Hockney quotes a quote from Delacroix, according to which an artist must be "skillful enough to sketch a man who throws himself out of a window during the time it takes him to fall from the fourth stage ". This keen sense of observation on the spot, common to Matisse and Hockney, is particularly illustrated in the portraits in which they each took as subject their loved ones seized in moments of abandonment. Thus the engraving Petit bois clair (1906) depicting Matisse's muse as closely as possible, hung opposite the print Celia in a Polka-Dot Skirt ( 1980). It is also amusing to compare a Étude d'antique Matisse from the end of the 19th century with the " Boys in a Shower" painted by Hockney in the 1970s. The two painters also shared a tropism for the South, Nice for Matisse, California for Hockney, in search of a light that irradiates their canvases and communicates this pure joy that Hockney perceives in those of his elder (“full of joy”). The principle is still active in the masterpieces brought together here, Interior with black fern by Matisse, Fire Island Interior (1976) by Hockney, and whose presence puts on the trail of this “Paradise regained”. Around the theme of flowers, a bouquet of exhibitions The program of the Biennale des arts de Nice provides a skillful mix of heritage themes and contemporary art. In the superb patrician building of the Massena Museum, “Nice, queen of flowers” ​​sheds historical, sociological and even political light on the generic theme. Unpublished in France, the presentation of the series "Roses from my Garden" by photographer Nick Knight, known for his fashion shots, flirts with kitsch, while, in the adjoining gallery, "Anthèses" features the artist Catherine Larré, discovered by the curator of the Biennale, Jean-Jacques Aillagon. “Flos vitae” summons herbariums, watercolors and botany for a natural history of flowers… In all, eleven exhibitions are to be discovered until the end of the year. Our preference goes to “Power Flower”, which brings together around forty contemporary artists on a proposal by curator Marie Maertens. The vast hall at 109 is a thankless space, but the density of the selection, which includes some specifically produced works and has benefited from the support of some twenty Parisian galleries, manages to make it forget. The route unfolds like an exquisite corpse, from a mural playing with the strangeness of plants by Robert Brambora to an ambiguous organic sculpture by Rachel de Joode, from a photograph mixing vegetation and modernist architecture by Caio Reisewitz to a series of monochromes presented under glass by Kees Visser. It's only in the fall that the Mamac will join the program with “Devenir Fleur”, an ambitious multidisciplinary exhibition. from a mural playing with the strangeness of plants by Robert Brambora to an ambiguous organic sculpture by Rachel de Joode, from a photograph mixing vegetation and modernist architecture by Caio Reisewitz to a series of monochromes presented under glass by Kees Visser. It's only in the fall that the Mamac will join the program with “Devenir Fleur”, an ambitious multidisciplinary exhibition. from a mural playing with the strangeness of plants by Robert Brambora to an ambiguous organic sculpture by Rachel de Joode, from a photograph mixing vegetation and modernist architecture by Caio Reisewitz to a series of monochromes presented under glass by Kees Visser. It's only in the fall that the Mamac will join the program with “Devenir Fleur”, an ambitious multidisciplinary exhibition. Flowers!, Biennial of the Arts, eleven exhibitions in the museums of the City of Nice, Biennaledesarts2022.nice.
In addition to the Matisse Museum (above): Masséna Museum, “Nice, Queen of Flowers”, until October 9; Nice/Cimiez Archeology Museum, “Flos Vitae”, until October 9; Charles-Nègre Photography Museum, “Roses from my Garden until September 25; Palais Lascaris, “Eve Pietrushi, Artemisia” and “Fleuraisons baroques”, until January 9, 2023; International Museum of Naive Art-Anatole-Jakovsky, “The Male Flowers”, until September 19; Gallery of the Charles-Nègre Photography Museum, “Catherine Larré, Anthèses”, until September 11; Jules-Chéret Museum of Fine Arts, “Fleurs d'artifice”, until October 30; 109, “Power Flower”, until September 3; Mamac, “Cosmogony II. Become a flower, Hockney-Matisse, A Paradise Found, until September 18, Matisse Museum, 164, av. Arenas of Cimiez, 06000 Nice.
Seen in Le Journal des Arts, article by Anne Cecile Sanchez

Hockney meeting Matisse illuminates the Nice Biennale

Flowers are the theme of the new edition of the Biennale des arts de Nice. The Matisse Museum is taking the opportunity to offer a...

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