BERNARD JOUBERT • LE FIXE ET LE VARIABLE

EXHIBITION FROM 5 SEPTEMBER TO 22 OCTOBER 2023
SPECIAL PREVIEW DURING "LES TRAVERSÉES DU MARAIS" FESTIVAL: 1st-3rd SEPTEMBER 2023
OPENING: TUESDAY 5 SEPTEMBER 2023 (6-9pm)
SPECIAL EVENT “STARTING SUNDAY“: SUNDAY 15 OCTOBER 2023 (2-6pm)

As part of our curatorial program, we are proud to invite, once a year, an artist who has built up an exceptional body of work that deserves to be highlighted. Following the successful exhibitions featuring Hideyuki Ishibashi, Jean de Pomereu and Máté Dobokay, we present this year, a solo exhibition of Bernard Joubert's oeuvre, a set of minimalist paintings and a never-before-seen series of photographs made in New York, Paris, Venice and Brussels in the 1970s.

Born in Paris in 1946, Bernard Joubert is a visual artist known for his minimalist paintings, whose first solo show took place in 1974 at the renowned Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris. From the outset, Joubert painted on loose canvases, usually tracing lines of color directly with a paint tube. From 1973 onwards, he left the canvas behind and began to paint a series of ribbons, summoning up geometric shapes and inviting the viewer to participate mentally in the work by "finalizing" these suggested forms (square, rectangle, trapezoid...). For almost ten years, these colored lines painted on cotton ribbons delineate geometric surfaces, without these surfaces being closed. It is these ribbons that punctuate the scenography of our space, alongside a series of photographs made between 1975 and 1977 and exhibited for the very first time.

As art critic Bernard Marcelis explains, Bernard Joubert's practice lies as much in the interstices of the pictorial realm as on the fringe of the support, dealing with the relationship of the work to the wall and, consequently, to the interaction it has with the surrounding space. This definition of Bernard Joubert's work takes on its full meaning when we see the vintage silver gelatin prints on display, for which the artist installed the same painted work (a 200 × 4.5 cm rectangle delimited by a white and a black ribbon) in the streets of Paris, New York, Venice and Brussels. Here, the wall is no longer a neutral space simply for hanging the painting, separate from and unrelated to the painting, but plays a part in constituting the work; the wall represents the variable aspect of the work in relation to the size - which always remains fixed - and shape of each ribbon.



Bernard Joubert's work has been exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. His work can be found in the prestigious collections of MoMA in New York, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MAMCO in Geneva, the CAB Foundation in Brussels and the Panza di Biumo collection in Italy.

Accompanying the exhibition is an artist's book, released in a limited edition of 200 copies.