GRIBOUILLAGE / SCARABOCCHIO From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly

DATES

From wednesday 8 february 2023 to sunday 30 April 2023

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Wednesday to Sunday 1pm – 7pm, Thursday night until 9pm

LOCATION

Palais des Beaux-Arts

ADDRESS

13 quai Malaquais, 75006 Paris

Exhibition conceived by the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis and the Beaux-Arts de Paris, with the support of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris. A first part was presented in Rome from March to May 2022.

Bringing together more than one hundred and fifty original works from the Renaissance to the contemporary period, Gribouillage / Scarabocchio highlights one of the most repressed and least controlled aspects of drawing practice. By addressing the multiple facets of “scribbling”,
the exhibition reveals how these experimental, transgressive, regressive or unintentional graphic gestures can be used to
transgressive, regressive or liberating, which seem to obey no law, have always punctuated the history of artistic creation.

By proposing new comparisons between the works of the masters of early modernity – Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bernini… – and those of major modern and contemporary artists – Jean Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, Helen Levitt, Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Luigi Pericle… – the exhibition blurs chronological classifications and traditional categories (margin and centre, official and unofficial, classic and contemporary, work and document) and places the practice of doodling at the heart of artistic making.

Curators: Francesca Alberti, Director of the Department of Art History at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, Associate Professor at the University of Tours, CESR and Diane Bodart, Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia University, New York.

Associate curators: Anne-Marie Garcia, heritage curator, responsible for the collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris and Philippe-Alain Michaud, art historian, heritage curator at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou.

Thematic tours of the exhibition will be offered on Thursdays at 6.30 pm during the nocturnes – detailed programme to come.

CATALOGUE

The exhibition catalogue, which brings together 300 of the works exhibited in Rome and Paris, is published in Italian and French versions, co-edited by Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions and the Villa Medici. This reference publication offers a richly documented synthesis of the two exhibitions.

Number of pages: 400
Price incl. VAT: €39.00

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Directed and introduced by the curators of the exhibition, Francesca Alberti and Diane Bodart, it contains seven chapters and brings together unpublished contributions by numerous authors whose essays and notes shed light on the works and extend the research work.

Authors of the essays: Francesca Alberti, Diane Bodart, Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Baptiste Brun, Angela Cerasuolo, Hugo Daniel, Vincent Debaene, Dario Gamboni, Tim Ingold, Giorgio Marini, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anne Monfort-Tanguy, Mauro Mussolin, Gabriella Pace, Maria Stavrinaki, Nicola Suthor, Alice Thomine-Berrada, Barbara Wittmann.

Authors of the notes: Marco Simone Bolzoni, Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Cristina Cilli, Anne Marie Garcia, Gloria Guida, Mauro Mussolin, Federica Rinaldi, Carla Subrizi, Meta Valiusaityte.

Graphic designer: Mauro Bubbico.

Luigi Pericle, Untitled, (Matri Dei d.d.d.), 1965, Mixed media on canvas, 80 x 129,5 cm

Enter the Palais des Beaux-Arts

Exhibition: “LUIGI PERICLE. SCRIBBLING / SCARABOCCHIO. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly”, Paris, Beaux-Arts, 8 February-30 April 2023

LUIGI PERICLE. 4000 unpublished works, the rediscovery in an abandoned house in Switzerland

As part of the exhibition GRIBOUILLAGE / SCARABOCCHIO From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly, Beaux-Arts de Paris, the work of Luigi Pericle (1916-2001) will be officially presented for the first time in France, providing an opportunity to retrace the rediscovery, life and work of one of the most mysterious and fascinating protagonists of the twentieth century art scene.

Born in Switzerland in 1916, Pericle is an artist outside the canon. In the 1960s he exhibited in museums and alongside such great artists as Henri Michaux, Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Karel Appel, Sam Francis, Asger Jorn, Antoni Tàpies and Pablo Picasso. Valued by leading international figures such as Sir Herbert Read – advisor to Peggy Guggenheim and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London -, collector Peter G. Staechelin, Peter Cochrane and Martin Summer of the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in London, at the end of 1965, at the height of his career, he decided to withdraw from the art system, to give up the mundane and to devote himself solely to his artistic research and the study of mysteries: He then retired with his wife Nini to a voluntary hermitage, his house in Ascona, on the slopes of Monte Verità (Mountain of Truth), which still enjoyed the mystical aura of the utopian colony of the beginning of the century.

The artist’s house, which remained abandoned for fifteen years and was bought in December 2016, now reveals the artist’s meticulous and systematic work of expressive research, a corpus of almost 4000 unpublished works including canvases, works on isorel and Indian ink on paper, a lively correspondence with various intellectuals of the time, a rich library, study books and an unpublished novel entitled Bis ans Ende der Zeiten (“Until the End of Time”), a sum of universal esoteric thought.

The plan to study, restore, conserve and catalogue his artistic heritage – protected by the non-profit association Archivio Luigi Pericle di Ascona, which was set up in 2019 – is part of a wide-ranging enhancement programme, of which participation in the group exhibition GRIBOUILLAGE / SCARABOCCHIO From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly at the Beaux-Arts in Paris is a central element.

For more press information on Luigi Pericle, please contact Greta Biasca-Caroni | info@luigipericle.org | +41 (0)79 245 09 65