Retrospective Exhibition 'Gerard Garouste' to be held from 28 Jan at NGMA

The said exhibition is proposed to be officially inaugurated at the Temporary Exhibition Hall, NGMA, New Delhi on 28/01/2020 at 5.30 pm.

The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi is organizing the Retrospective Exhibition titled "Gerard Garouste – The Other Side", in collaboration with the Embassy of France / French Institute in India under the auspices of the Cultural Exchange Programme at NGMA from 28th January to 29th March 2020. This exhibition is Curated by Mr. Jean-Jacques Aillagon, former French Minister of Culture.

The said exhibition is proposed to be officially inaugurated at the Temporary Exhibition Hall, NGMA, New Delhi on 28/01/2020 at 5.30 pm. This exhibition will be inaugurated by the Union Minister of Culture Shri Prahlad Singh Patel in the gracious presence of Minister of Culture France and other dignitaries from India and France. The Exhibition's Catalogue will be released during the inauguration of this exhibition.

From 28 January to 29 March 2020, a major retrospective of Gérard Garouste's work will be held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi, India. The survey exhibition will feature around fifty paintings covering forty years of artistic creation, from 1980 to 2019. It is the biggest exhibition of the artist's work outside Europe. Gérard Garouste has always had a personal preoccupation with India and its culture. Constantly intrigued by the fundamentals of humanity and the metaphysical, his discovery of the country link to his own cosmogony. As well as travelling around for his own, he also worked in India on projects for his art education charity, La Source, during the 1990s.

Part of a new initiative by the National Gallery of Modern Art to open up public awareness of European artists, the exhibition is under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and InstitutFrançais, along with the support of private patrons, encouraging art lovers in India to discover the work of one of France's great artists. GalerieTemplon, who promotes Indian artists such as Sudarshan Shetty, Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, and Anju Dodiya, facilitated the conversation between the artist and the museum as part of its ongoing artistic exchange with the artistic scene in India.

This important cultural event will be curated by Jean-Jacques Aillagon, previously president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Minister of Culture and former President of Versailles. The exhibition's visitors can discover a complex body of work, where Christian and Hebrew cultures, myths and legends meet and mingle. A broad study of Gérard Garouste's work, the exhibition covers several series: le Classicist and the Apache, les Indiennes, Dante (Divine Comedy), Rabelais (la Dive Bacbuc), Cervantes (Don Quixotte), Portraits, Goethe (Faust), Diana and Actaeon, the Bible and the Talmud.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a 216-page monograph will be published featuring all the works on display. It will include two new texts by former French Minister of Culture and Communication, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, and Indian poet and art critic RanjitHoskote. It will also feature an interview of the artist by art historian Hortense Lyon and several excerpts from older texts, including those by Marc Augé, Olivier Kaeppelin, Marc-Alain Ouaknin, and Daniel Sibony.

Born in 1946 in Paris, Gérard Garouste lives and works in Paris and Normandy. One of the leading figures in French art, as both painter and sculptor, is obsessed by the origins of our culture, myths and the legacy left us by the old masters. The artist uses his own life as a springboard for his work by 'dismantling images and words' from it and channeling his fascination with the questions of origins, time and transmission. Born of associations of ideas, his paintings are at once unsettling and joyful, teeming with animals – some of the fantastical – and a cast of different characters. His sources range from the Bible to popular culture and literary greats, from Cervantes to Kafka.

Gérard Garouste was represented by Leo Castelli in New York and by Rudolf Zwirner in Cologne in the 1980s. He exhibited at the Durand-Dessert gallery in Paris from 1980 to 2001, before entering the Templon gallery in 2002. The Museum National d'Art Moderne de Paris-Center Georges Pompidou organized its first exhibition in 1988. Two retrospectives are then dedicated to him, in 2009 at the Villa Medici in Rome (The Classicist and the Apache) and then in 2015 at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. In December 2017, he was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. In 1991, he founded La Source, an association aimed at helping disadvantaged children and young people. In January 2020, he will receive the Scopus Prize, awarded by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In September 2022, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris-Center Georges Pompidou will dedicate a new and important retrospective.

(With Inputs from PIB)