ART BASEL

For the 2024 edition of Art Basel, Galerie Le Minotaure proposes a monographic exhibition of César Domela (19001992), Dutch artist who began his career in the first half of the 1920s as a member of the De Stijl group and ended as one of the indisputable masters of relief in the 20th century.

Our exhibition will be composed of 14 pieces embracing different periods of Domela’s work as well as the diversity of media and techniques that he explored in his career: photographs, photomontages, paintings, but above all the reliefs reconciling geometry and organicism which constitute the main axis of his artistic trajectory.

All the pieces that we will present are of museum quality and have been exhibited during the artist’s numerous exhibitions organized in France and abroad. First of all, we have to mention the very early black and white collage from 1923 representing the artist’s father and the rare neoplastic canvas realized by Domela in 1926 after meeting in Paris Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian who taught him the discipline, the sense of balance and the rules of composition and with whom he forged a deep and lasting friendship that even survived the schism that Domela effected by freeing himself from straight lines and primary colors. From 1925, he began to transgress the neoplastic system and its law of balance, creating the illusion of depth and abandoning perpendiculars in favor of obliques or diagonals lines, as evidenced by our Composition n°5K.

Subsequently, Domela’s intense exchanges with the artists from Bauhaus of Dessau (Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy) and with the Group K of the Abstracts of Hanover in the late 1920s and early 1930, oriented his work towards the ideas of Russian constructivism and led him to abandon painting to invest himself in the applied arts and to embrace the relation between art and architecture. From this period, we will exhibit some black and white photographs and photomontages (other versions of which are found in collections of Centre Pompidou, for example).

Collages and photomontages encouraged Domela to introduce into his work elements foreign to painting, inevitably leading him towards the third dimension. The constant observation of nature (also through photography) as well as his fascination for Chinese, Indian, Islamic calligraphy or even Irish illuminations allow him to develop his personal approach to relief. The one from 1939 (Relief n°15A) is a perfect example of the rich compositions made by Domela with diverse and unusual materials such as wood, shark skin, tortoise shells, suede, copper, brass, or plexiglass, etc., favoring sinuous curves, ellipses, circles, and arabesques. Those made during the II World War (Relief n°15H, 1942-43; Relief n°18, 1944) bear witness to the period when he exhibited alongside Nicolas de Staëland Wassily Kandinsky at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher or Esquisse.

The exhibition is accompanied by an important, richly illustrated, and documented catalog, produced in collaboration with Christian Derouet.