Pierrette Bloch: Discrete Series.
Soulages Museum, Rodez| N° d'inventaire | 30572 |
| Format | 22 x 27 |
| Détails | 112 p., numerous color photographs, paperback. |
| Publication | Rodez, 2024. |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782490432097 |
Pierrette Bloch (1928-2017) was a Franco-Swiss painter and sculptor who throughout her life developed an art steeped in subtlety. Not belonging to any aesthetic field, very independent, she established a rhythm, a balance between emptiness and fullness, a dialectic between black and white left in reserve, snowy. She created groups of works with rarefied means, elementary forms (points, lines, interlacing, loops, meshes...), kinds of writing devoid of meaning, "secret alphabets", as proposed by Frédéric Edelmann in 1978. She practiced drawing (graphite, chalk, pastel, charcoal), collage, painting on paper, sculpture, notably with the use of twisted horsehair threads on nylon lines. Her formats are often eccentric, very small, for example, or disproportionately elongated – sometimes reaching ten meters for only a few centimeters in width. There is musicality and infinite poetry in Pierrette Bloch's work, which has been compared to those of Supports / Surfaces, Cy Twombly or Henri Michaux. She worked in Paris in her studio on rue Antoine-Chantin, from 1954 until her death, and in her Mediterranean house in Bages, near Narbonne.
In simplicity, Pierrette Bloch's singularity lies in combining a semblance of order, a dense vocabulary, and a chaos that does not exclude humor. The tenuous thread rubs shoulders with the ink blot.
Pierrette Bloch was close to the Soulages couple. Pierre Soulages, who met her in 1949 in her studio on rue Schoelcher in Paris, described her in 2018 as "a lifelong friend." This testimony of loyalty is the reason why this exhibition, far from being a retrospective—it will be held in spring 2025 at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Saint-Étienne—takes place as part of the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the Musée Soulages, Rodez taking place in 2024. The works of Pierre Soulages bequeathed by Pierrette Bloch to the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne will be presented on this occasion. These works from the 1950s, paintings on canvas or paper, remained hung in her Parisian living room for nearly seventy years, constantly demonstrating the friendly closeness of the two artists.
Discrete Series is a title borrowed from the American Objectivist poet George Oppen, whom the visual artist particularly appreciated. This title, which dates from 1934, refers to a mathematical series with the terms "each empirically derived, each empirically true." Empiricism, serial work, discretion in every sense of the word, all these points resonate with the work and personality of Pierrette Bloch. The fifty or so pieces on display, from the Grenoble Museum, the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, the Pierrette Bloch Endowment Fund and private collections, will bear witness to this serial production, around seven sets characteristic of the artist: I- Blue collages from 1971. II- Ink lines from 1995. III- Saturated drawings from 1997. IV- Horsehair thread from the 1980s. V- Writing pages from 1986. VI- Large dot drawings from 1996. VII- Set of Asian papers from 2006.
Pierrette Bloch (1928-2017) was a Franco-Swiss painter and sculptor who throughout her life developed an art steeped in subtlety. Not belonging to any aesthetic field, very independent, she established a rhythm, a balance between emptiness and fullness, a dialectic between black and white left in reserve, snowy. She created groups of works with rarefied means, elementary forms (points, lines, interlacing, loops, meshes...), kinds of writing devoid of meaning, "secret alphabets", as proposed by Frédéric Edelmann in 1978. She practiced drawing (graphite, chalk, pastel, charcoal), collage, painting on paper, sculpture, notably with the use of twisted horsehair threads on nylon lines. Her formats are often eccentric, very small, for example, or disproportionately elongated – sometimes reaching ten meters for only a few centimeters in width. There is musicality and infinite poetry in Pierrette Bloch's work, which has been compared to those of Supports / Surfaces, Cy Twombly or Henri Michaux. She worked in Paris in her studio on rue Antoine-Chantin, from 1954 until her death, and in her Mediterranean house in Bages, near Narbonne.
In simplicity, Pierrette Bloch's singularity lies in combining a semblance of order, a dense vocabulary, and a chaos that does not exclude humor. The tenuous thread rubs shoulders with the ink blot.
Pierrette Bloch was close to the Soulages couple. Pierre Soulages, who met her in 1949 in her studio on rue Schoelcher in Paris, described her in 2018 as "a lifelong friend." This testimony of loyalty is the reason why this exhibition, far from being a retrospective—it will be held in spring 2025 at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Saint-Étienne—takes place as part of the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the Musée Soulages, Rodez taking place in 2024. The works of Pierre Soulages bequeathed by Pierrette Bloch to the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d'Art Moderne will be presented on this occasion. These works from the 1950s, paintings on canvas or paper, remained hung in her Parisian living room for nearly seventy years, constantly demonstrating the friendly closeness of the two artists.
Discrete Series is a title borrowed from the American Objectivist poet George Oppen, whom the visual artist particularly appreciated. This title, which dates from 1934, refers to a mathematical series with the terms "each empirically derived, each empirically true." Empiricism, serial work, discretion in every sense of the word, all these points resonate with the work and personality of Pierrette Bloch. The fifty or so pieces on display, from the Grenoble Museum, the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, the Pierrette Bloch Endowment Fund and private collections, will bear witness to this serial production, around seven sets characteristic of the artist: I- Blue collages from 1971. II- Ink lines from 1995. III- Saturated drawings from 1997. IV- Horsehair thread from the 1980s. V- Writing pages from 1986. VI- Large dot drawings from 1996. VII- Set of Asian papers from 2006.