From October 18, 2025 to January 31, 2026, Galerie Le Minotaure will present the exhibition “Alexander Archipenko. The American Years”, highlighting a particularlyrich yet still little-explored period of the Ukrainian artist’s career: the years from the 1930s to the 1950s, marked by his settlement and activity in the United States. This journey across two decades reveals an extraordinary creative vitality, grounded in formal experimentation, the exploration of new materials, and the teaching of art as a method of transformation.
Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), born in Kyiv, had already established himself as a pioneer of modern sculpture by the 1910s. Settled in Paris since 1908, herevolutionized sculpture by introducing the void as a full-fledged plastic element, combining concave and convex volumes, and integrating innovative materials into hisworks. He merged the contributions of Cubism with a more dynamic spatial conception, creating sculptures that seem imbued with movement. In the 1920s, healso developed the “sculpto-painting” and, in 1924, invented the Archipentura, a visual machine producing a mechanical effect of motion on the surface of the image.
In 1923, he emigrated to the United States, where he developed an original approachto art pedagogy, centered on stimulating creativity and fostering the student’sautonomy. In 1935, while living in Los Angeles, he created several terracotta sculptures, both expressive and tactile, which contrasted with the rigor of his bronzes and metal works. The organic texture of these pieces reflects a return to hisUkrainian roots while engaging in dialogue with Western modernism.
From 1937 onward, he exhibited regularly at the Katherine Kuh Gallery in Chicago (until 1942) and took an active part in the American art scene. He founded a schoolin Bearsville in 1938 and taught across the country, from the West Coast to the East Coast, embodying the itinerant and pioneering spirit of the avant-garde.
This period is also marked by the legacy of the Bauhaus, especially in Chicago, where he engaged in reflections on the synthesis of art and technology. Archipenko pursued research into materials that were then unprecedented in the field of sculpture: acrylic glass, reflective surfaces, plastics, metal, and found objects. Moving away from classical monumentality, he introduced transparency, lightness, and movement, playing with dynamic relationships between solid and void.
His works of the 1940s are imbued with the combined influence of Constructivism and Cubism, but also with a desire to redefine the role of sculpture in modernity. The exhibition presents several emblematic pieces from this period, including Torso in Space (1935), Vertical Figure (1935), Josephine Bonaparte (1935), Head (1936), Architectural Figure (1936/1957), which explores the link between sculpture and architectural structure, and Woman in Fur (1936).
Ce cycle d’expérimentations aboutit à son retour sur la scène artistique européenne, avec une exposition à l’Amt für Kunst à Berlin en 1949, suivie de grandes rétrospectives aux États-Unis et en Europe durant les années 1950.
By shedding light on this American period of Alexander Archipenko, the exhibition reveals an artist in constant search, capable of renewing the very foundations of modern sculpture through matter, light, and movement.