Barbara Chase-RiboudQuand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéréBarbara Chase-Riboud
Quand Un Noeud Est Dénoué, Un Dieu Est Libéré, a solo exhibition featuring works by Barbara Chase-Riboud marks the first time eight Parisian museums join forces to honor and highlight the relation to heritage of an artist during their lifetime.
For seven decades Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1939) has created abstract artworks which conveys her singular command of memory, history, identity and monumentality.
Through a series of site-specific installations this multi museum exhibition explores the ways in which Chase-Riboud’s abstract sculpture, drawings and poetry converse with the permanent collections of these Parisian institutions. Carving, folding and fusing thin sheets of wax into geometric forms, her bronze sculptures are composed using the lost wax casting method. Each work is completely unique. Her multi-disciplinary artistic practice challenges the contradictions hard/soft, male/female, Western/non-Western, stable/fluid, figurative/abstract, powerful/powerless.
A testament to her travels throughout Europe, Africa and Asia and mastery of form, this exhibition features an ensemble of sculptures which present a hybrid of aesthetic discourses bridging national, racial and cultural traditions into a magnificent demonstration of the power of bronze and silk. At each site, sculpture is paired with a poem from the Every Time A Knot is Undone, A God is Released, creating a dialogue between Chase-Riboud’s material and immaterial expression of ideas.
This exhibition is made possible by the support of the Ford Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. This exhibition is curated by Erin Jenoa Gilbert and Donatien Grau.
programmation et events :
Friday 18 october, 7 p.m : Presentation of the exhibition, Auditorium Michel Laclotte, musée du Louvre
With Claire Bettinelli (Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet), Ariane Coulondre (Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou), Nicolas Gausserand (Musée d’Orsay), Erin Jenoa Gilbert, Donatien Grau (Musée du Louvre), Sarah Lignier (Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac), Marie-Pauline Martin (Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris), Laëtitia Ferreira (Musée national de l'histoire de l’immigration – Palais de la Porte Dorée) et Hugo Vitrani (Palais de Tokyo).
Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac
15 OCTOBER 2024 - 13 JANUARY 2025
The presentation of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s monumental sculpture Standing Black Woman Black Tower (1973) reveals the relationship between Chase-Riboud sculptures, the collections and the architecture of the musée du Quai-Branly – Jacques Chirac - dedicated to the arts and civilizations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
Chase-Riboud traveled throughout Africa, visiting Egypt, Algiers, Tunisia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Senegal between 1958 and 1975. This monochromatic form alludes to the totemic structures honoring the ancestors, which adorn the entrances of West African shrines. Unlike other sculptures, here the bronze element is broken into two sections which clasp a skirt of loose marine cord between, the uppermost bronze element is carved into abstract pattern repetated at the base. Chase-Riboud explains “The skirt sculptures which suddenly transferred the characteristics of one material to another evolved because I wanted freedom from the tyranny of the base and legs and I found the answer in the African dancing mask which hides the porter of the mask with fiber.”
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
37, quai Branly, 75007 Paris, France
www.quaibranly.fr
Musée d'Orsay
17 SEPTEMBER 2024 - 15 DECEMBER 2024
The Salon de l’Horloge, in the gare d’Orsay, has become the epitome of modern time, symbolizing it for visitors around the world. Barbara Chase-Riboud has engaged with issues of temporality across her entire body of work, creating alternative paths to, through and from history in order to understand what it means to live as a human. In this presentation, time will be of the essence. Time Womb is a series of six sculptures evocative of non-western traditions which forge syncretic associations with the concept of time, begun in 1961 and completed in 1971. In this installation, four Time Wombs surround Bathers, a minimalist relief consisting of 16 rectangles of shiny cast aluminum with wavy surfaces which lie on the center of the floor evoking a reflecting pool. In Chase-Riboud’s construction, between each aluminum block in this grid, braided cords of silk bulge the surface evoking rock formations revealed as water runs through them. Bathers which is illuminated by the poem of the same title, Bathers.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
1, rue de la Légion-d’Honneur, 75007 Paris, France
www.musee-orsay.fr
Musée du Louvre
9 OCTOBER 2024 - 6 JANUARY 2025
Under the Louvre Pyramid, the 1973 stele Gold Column evokes the presence of a royal figure. In the collections of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, as well as Egyptian antiquities, it is the figure of Cleopatra, central to the artist’s work since her discovery of Egypt in 1958, that is invoked: Greek and Egyptian princess, scholar and politician, present in two departments of the Louvre linked by the artist. During her journey, Barbara Chase-Riboud traveled along the Nile and visited the monuments of Alexandria, Luxor, and Cairo. She returned transformed. The Cleopatra series includes five monumental sculptures created over a period of thirty years (1973-2003), two of which are on display at the Louvre. These sculptures, resembling armors, are composed of hundreds of bronze tesserae connected by copper wires. This installation is illustrated by verses from Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, published in 1987.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France
www.louvre.fr
Philharmonie de Paris
12 OCTOBER 2024 - 13 JANUARY2025
At the Philharmonie, an institution dedicated to the presentation of musical performances as well as the understanding of music in its context, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s La Musica Josephine, Black/Red 2021, is presented in the round. Executed in honor of the legendary performer Josephine Baker, this angular work is reminiscent of the musical note eighth rest. The knotted red cord suspended from the black base seems to dance as viewers traverse around it. Baker like Chase-Riboud, was born in the US, but spent her life as an artist and activist in Paris. They met only once, backstage hours before Josephine’s last performance at the Bobino. Forty-six years later while attending Baker’s internmentat the Pantheon, Chase-Riboud imagined this monumental sculpture. This sculpture is presented with Barbara Chase-Riboud’s manifesto - From Malcolm to Josephine.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
221, avenue Jean-Jaurès, 75019 Paris, France
www.philharmoniedeparis.fr
Musée Guimet
16 OCTOBER 2024 - 6 JANUARY 2025
Before Chase-Riboud made her first sculptures combining fiber with bronze, she made a pivotal journey which became as significant for her artistic development as the Egyptian trip taken in 1958 while she was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. During the height of the Vietnam War in 1965, she accompanied her then husband Marc Riboud on a voyage to the People’s Republic. They travelled by train into the interior of China, to discover the People's Republic of China.
The sculpture Mao’s Organ, 2007 presented at Musee Guimet was completed after the artist’s most recent trip to China in April of 2007. Mao’s Organ’s composition recalls Chase-Riboud’s observations of the reclining stone Buddhas in China that she described as “beautifully calculated pattern of flat overlapping folds that are incised as drawing rather than carved as sculpture.” This monumental sculpture will be presented alongside a series of archival photographs taken by Marc Riboud and the artists personal collection of Chinese Seals acquired during her first trip to China in 1965. This installation will be presented with Chase-Riboud’s poems: Han Shroud and Well of the Concubine Pearl.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
6, place d’Iéna, 75116 Paris, France
www.guimet.fr
Palais de Tokyo
17 OCTOBER 2024 - 5 JANUARY 2025
The Black Standing Women of Venice, produced between 2021 and 2023 is Chase-Riboud’s most recent work to date. Conceived in response to Giacometti’s Walking Man, this is the largest presentation of this series of unique monochromatic minimalist sculptures named for women poets throughout history. Situated as one monument to the power of women, the presentation is illuminated by the echoing chorus of distinctive female artist, curators, authors and activists reciting poetry from Chase-Riboud’s collection of verse Every Time a Knot is Undone, a God is Released.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
13, avenue du Président-Wilson, 75116 Paris, France
www.palaisdetokyo.com
Palais de la Porte Dorée
1st OCTOBER 2024 - 12 JANUARY 2025
In the Salon des lacques of the Palais De La Porte Dorée two early monumental sculptures from the Zanzibar series engage with the building’s Art Deco aesthetics. Produced in 1972 and 1974 respectively these sculptures present the form for which Barbara Chase-Riboud is known best, bronze mantel whose base is concealed by a skirt constructed of silk, wool and synthetic fibers.
Chase-Riboud began her Zanzibar series in 1970, naming the sculptures after Zanzibar, an East African island in the Indian Ocean that was a main hub for the Arab slave trade, thriving in the 17-19th centuries. In Zanzibar Gold, coils of blonde silk, twisted, knitted, looped, braided, knotted, fall to the floor from a polish bronze high relief. Against a white wall this monochromatic sculpture operates as an abstract painting. In Zanzibar/Black, the blackened bronze melts seamlessly into the black wool, the dark color acts as unifying force between material and texture. These sculptures are accompanied by Barbara’s epic poem Why Did We Leave Zanzibar.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
293, avenue Daumesnil, 75012 Paris, France
www.palais-portedoree.fr
Centre Pompidou
15 OCTOBER 2024 – 9 MARCH 2025
A group of five monumental sculptures is presented within the collection display of the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou (level 5, room 37). While Barbara Chase-Riboud's sculptural language is singular, her works resonate with those of other major artists in the collection, such as Germaine Richier, Louise Nevelson or Henri Matisse. Exhibited for the first time in Europe, these organic yet abstract works combine the practice of weaving with bronze sculpture. Polished metal becomes a dynamic structure, a shining skein supported by supple braids of silk or wool rope. Through their titles, the sculptures refer to History, such as the series of imaginary monuments to Malcolm X, or to the history of modern art (Matisse’s Back in Twins, 1967/1994). They take the form of majestic steles, draped in baroque colors of gold, red and black, evoking pomp and power. Placing the artist's creative process in dialogue with the art of her time, this exhibition highlights her relationship with space and monumentality, her experimentation with color and material and her relationship with history and memory. These works are accompanied by Barbara Chase-Riboud's poem, Been There, Done That.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION :
Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France
www.centrepompidou.fr
Biography
Born in Philadelphia P.A. in 1939, Chase-Riboud currently resides in Paris. Chase-Riboud earned her BFA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. In 1957, she was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Introduced to a foundry for the first time, the artist would begin developing a new variation on the ancient lost-wax technique of casting bronze by using sheets of pliable wax that she could fold in order to cast the ribbons of metal that would later become a signature of her aesthetic. In 1958, Chase-Riboud entered the MFA program at Yale University School of Design and Architecture becoming the first Black woman to receive an MFA in Art and Architecture from Yale. Chase-Riboud left for London and, subsequently, Paris, where she has remained since 1961.
In Paris, Chase-Riboud established a successful sculpting career, meeting fellow artists and cultural figures such as Alberto Giacometti, James Baldwin, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Henri Cartier-Bresson and his protégé, the photojournalist Marc Eugène Riboud, whom she married.
In 1999 Barbara Chase-Riboud was the first living female artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The recipient of numerous awards, in 1996 she was knighted by the French government as Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2021 she was awarded the AWARE Prixe for Outstanding Merit and the Artistic Prize from the Simon and Cino and Del Duca Foundation. In 2022 she was awarded Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Sculpture Center the French Legion D’ Honneur. Her work has been acquired by numerous museums including the France’s National Collection of Plastique Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Guggenheim, Tate Modern, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, Berkeley Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Glenstone Museum, Yale University Art Museum, Colby Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Barbara Chase-Riboud’s recent solo exhibitions include Standing Woman of Venice/ Black Standing Woman of Venice at Giacometti Foundation, Monumentale: The Bronzes at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis (2022-2023), Infinite Folds at the Serpentine Galleries in London (2022-2023) and The Encounter: Barbara Chase-Riboud / Alberto Giacometti at MoMA (2023). She is the award-winning author of six novels, including Sally Hemings, The President’s Daughter, Valide, The Hottentot Venus and The Great Mrs. Elias, and three poetry collections including From Memphis to Peking, Portrait of A Nude Woman as Cleopatra. Her memoire, I Always Knew, intimate portrayal of Chase-Riboud’s life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991.