Galerie Le Minotaure inaugurates 2023, as well as its new space at 23 rue de Seine, with A monographic exhibition César Domela (1900-1992), Dutch artist who began his career in the first half of the 1920s as a member of the De Stijl group. Subsequently, he moved away from the principles of neoplasticism and gradually abandoned oil painting to create reliefs reconciling geometry and organicism, becoming one of the undeniable masters of the genre. His compositions of diverse materials (wood, sharkskin, tortoiseshell, suede, copper, brass, Plexiglas, etc.) favor sinuous curves, ellipses, circles, arabesques, shapes and patterns drawn from his knowledge and his passion for oriental thought and aesthetics.
After several stays in Berlin, where he had the opportunity to meet many influential artists – Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko, Raoul Hausmann, Naum Gabo, Kurt Schwitters, Carl Buchheister… – and to try out several practices such as graphic design, photomontage, typography or even interior design, Domela settled permanently in Paris in 1933. He became a member of Cercle et Carré, then of Abstraction Création, groups for which he actively contributed to reviews. In 1937, he founded the multilingual review Plastique with Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp.
During the war, when artistic activity was considerably reduced in Paris, he was regularly present at the Jeanne Bucher gallery, which at the time created a welcoming space for the Second School of Paris. He exhibited there in particular in February 1944 alongside Nicolas de Staël and Wassily Kandinsky. The same year, all of them with Magnelli also participated in the exhibition “Peintures Abstraites. Compositions de Matières” at Galerie Esquisse.
After the war, the richness and originality of his work will continue to be acclaimed, both in France, where he lived until his death in 1992, and abroad. He participated in numerous exhibitions dedicated to Concrete Art (Galerie Drouin, 1945), De Stijl (Stedelijk Museum, 1951), as well as the founding of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (from 1946); several retrospectives are dedicated to him in Paris (Galerie Denise René, 1947), London (Galerie Apollinaire, 1948; Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery, 1973), Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo (1954), Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum, 1955) , New York (Galerie Chalette, 1961), and even Calcutta (1979).
Our exhibition, made up of more than 50 pieces, several of museum quality, embraces these different periods of Domela’s work as well as the diversity of media and techniques he explored in his work: photographs, photomontages, paintings, sculptures, but especially the reliefs which constitute the culmination of his previous experiments and the main axis of his career.
It is accompanied by an important catalog richly illustrated and documented, produced in collaboration with Christian Derouet, curator, in charge of the Zervos Museum in Vézelay, which has constituted the archives of Léonce Rosenberg, Vassily Kandinsky and Cahiers d’Art at the Kandinsky Library of the National Museum of Modern Art – Center Georges Pompidou.