Art Basel 39 Hall 2.0 Stand M2

Dear Friends of the Gallery,

It was in the autumn of 1947 that a retrospective exhibition at the René Drouin Gallery in Paris focused critical attention on the work of Alberto Magnelli. The show constituted an an aesthetic revelation that provoked an almost unanimous jolt of enthusiasm among the public, even though it came rather late, considering that the fifty-nine year-old Florentine painter had already been working in France for fifteen years. Magnelli’s pioneering role in the elaboration of abstract art was well known, yet only with this show did he earn recognition as a contemporary and topical painter. He became a leading figure for a new generation of post-war artists who adopted geometric abstraction as a reaction against the trend toward lyrical, unstructured painting.

Alberto Magnelli—of whom Dewasne used to say, “He was the best”—will be the main feature of our stand at the Basel Art Fair, thanks to some fifteen works from all periods : paintings, collages, gouaches, and slates.
Following the Paris art fair (FIAC), the gallery has had a string of successful shows : Jean Gabriel Coignet, Hans-Jörg Glattfelder, Nicholas Bodde, and Manfred Mohr. Our next exhibition, of André Tempfel, opens on May 17, just before the Basel Fair.
In the events surrounding the show of “Geometric Abstraction and Lyrical Abstraction” at the Musée Ingres in Montauban, to which we contributed, great stress was placed on the work of Jean Dewasne.

Nantes is currently hosting a large group show (until June 9) on the theme of “More Reality,” which includes Jean-Gabriel Coignet and Antoine Perrot. It may well serve as a pendent to the exhibition mentioned below—it interrogates the commitment to abstraction on many levels, the works on show being so many attempts at a answer .
Antoine Perrot defended his Ph.D. on Imported Color at the University of Rennes. At the same time, a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York has addressed the same theme : Color Chart : Reinventing Color is a fascinating look at the use of industrial colors from Duchamp to Hirst. Furthermore, America is showing interest in the “cool” painting movement that includes a large group of American artists overlooked by the fads for pop and expressive subjectivity, including Bolotowksy and Mclaughlin.
Hans-Jörg Glattfelder, meanwhile, continues to give lectures on geometric abstraction, the most recent having taken place at Mouans Satroux.

In Basel we will be unveiling a few wonderful surprises among the classics—a very fine pastel by Aurélie Nemours and some new works by Glattfelder, whose non-Euclidian vision of flat planes sometimes attains a dizzying perspective. Also present will be sculptural works by Coignet as well as more classic sculptures by Marino di Teana, not forgetting magical pieces by Perrot (who subverts traditional painting materials) and a fascinating computer piece by Manfred Mohr (perhaps the most avant-garde work on our stand). Finally, we will offer a taste of our current show of work by André Stempfel, in which geometry assumes an unusually light, summery air.

We look forward to the festive atmosphere of this finest of art fairs, and hope to see you there.
Warm regards,

Anne Lahumière and the Gallery team

(1) Anne Maisonnier, foreword to the Alberto Magnelli catalogue published by Galerie Lahumière.