From May 11th, 2020 the galleries Le Minotaure and Alain Le Gaillard will present in their two spaces the exhibition around the reliefs of the three artists: Auguste Herbin, Étienne Béothy and César Domela.
In the first half of the 20th century, this practice became a means of expression which reflected majors problems faced by these creators confronted with events which hustled both socio-political and art history. Each of them, however, represents a different approach to relief, is part of another stage in the evolution of this technique and seeks, through this, answers to various personal artistic questions.
Herbin - the painter - plays the role of pioneer in this story: his polychrome reliefs and sculptures were created in 1920-21. After his cubist period and the war, this practice - situated halfway between abstraction and figuration - continues to be part of the search for the outcome of the dead end of cubism and the functional applications. At the very beginning of the 1930s, the reliefs of Beothy - a figurative sculptor in his early days - relief works testify his journey towards abstraction and his desire to better integrate into the Abstraction Création group, then composed mainly of painters. While for these two artists, the relief is only a provisional solution, limited in time, Domela, from 1928, will make it the main axis of his work, becoming one of the undisputed masters of the genre.
The exhibition will bring together around 60 works - reliefs, paintings, sculptures, works on paper - distributed in the two spaces, at the Galerie Le Minotaure (2 rue des Beaux-arts) and at the Galerie Alain Le Gaillard (19 rue Mazarine). It will be accompanied by a catalog of around 120 pages, with an introductory text on the subject of relief in Herbin, Béothy and Domela and color reproductions.