From February 15 to April 15, 2025

To inaugurate the year 2025, Galerie Le Minotaure is preparing an exhibition dedicated to the Armenian artist Ervand Kotchar and to dimensionism, a movement launched in the mid-1930s by the Hungarian art philosopher Charles Sirato, whose manifesto Kotchar signed. This exhibition will be held from February 15 to April 15, 2025 and will be organized in close collaboration with the Ervand Kotchar Museum and the artist’s family, who have made available to us their archives, which form the basis of the exhibition and the publication that will accompany it.

This event will be divided into two sections. The first will present the work of Ervand Kotchar, in particular his “paintings in space” produced in the years 1928-34, which constitute his major contribution to modern art of the interwar period. With his paintings in space, championed by the great Cubist dealer Léonce Rosenberg and the critic Waldemar George, Kotchar aspired to free traditional painting from two dimensions, tearing it away from the single surface to place it in space, thus inscribing himself in the principles of dimensionism to which the second part of the exhibition will be devoted.

Dimensionism, linked to recent discoveries in science (notably Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity), sought to respond to a sort of “dimensional inflation” observable at the beginning of the 20th century in the arts that sought to free themselves from their given format to conquer the next dimension (poetry “leaving the line” to encompass the pictorial plane, two-dimensional painting adding a third dimension of depth to enter space, and sculpture incorporating movement to occupy the fourth dimension of space-time). His manifesto, first published in 1936 by Editions José Corti in Paris, was signed by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia & Robert Delaunay, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, César Domela and also Ervand Kotchar.

The exhibition will also be accompanied by a major catalogue publishing several unpublished documents from the archives of Ervand Kotchar and Léonce Rosenberg, including the Kotchar-Rosenberg correspondence commented by Christian Derouet (former chief curator of heritage at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Zervos Museum in Vézelay), and Kotchar-Sirato on the dimensionist manifesto commented by Maria Tyl (PhD, head of Éditions Le Minotaure).