Galerie Zlotowski

Anne Bonnin is an exhibition curator and art critic. Continuing her research on modern and contemporary art in Portugal, she has curated three exhibitions, each accompanied by a catalogue. After organizing the first retrospective in France of the artist Lourdes Castro (2019) at the MRAC in Sérignan, she curated two collective exhibitions covering 100 years of art history: “Modernités Portugaises” at Maison Caillebotte (2022) and “Les Péninsules démarrées” at Frac Nouvelle Aquitaine MÉCA in Bordeaux (2022-23). As a guest curator, she has conceived numerous collective and monographic projects in various institutions in France, including: at the Le Grand Café art center in Saint-Nazaire in 2023, at the Synagogue de Delme in 2016, and at the Fondation Pernod Ricard, where she curated several exhibitions and programmed the “Entretiens sur l’art” from 2017 to 2021. In 2012, she directed Les Ateliers de Rennes – biennale d’art contemporain Les Prairies. As a resident of Villa Kujoyama in 2014, she writes catalogue texts and collaborates with the magazine Zéro-Deux.

This exhibition presents various artists who approach the motif of the stain in an abstract and sometimes figurative, manner: Pic Adrian, Jean Arp, Pierrette Bloch, André Derain, Jean Dubuffet, Oscar Dominguez, Sam Francis, Henri Michaux, Joan Miró, and Dove Allouche, William Anastasi, Sheila Hicks, Laura Lamiel, and Christopher Wool for contemporary artists.

“Both competitor as well as ally of the line, the stain is an aesthetic measure which the heterogeneous corpus of this exhibition ponders upon very freely. It brings together works of various techniques: touch, spray, splash, drip, smudge, imprint, impregnation, or even photographic printing. With the advent of modernism and the avant-garde, the stain has acquired a canonical status, which has multiplied its possibilities and expanded its field of action to all kinds of media,” writes Anne Bonnin, curator of the exhibition.

Anne Bonnin adds that the stain “this plastic element, at the very heart of painting, is characterized by its materiality, while being elusive. The stain takes us closest to the work, to its genesis as well as its secret. (…) we will evoke procedures that sometimes distinguish themselves or sometimes relate to each other.”

Through the vast aesthetic prism of this exhibition, from modern art to contemporary art, we see the stain “bounce or slide, transform from one work to another, in a playful yet precise game,” concludes Anne Bonnin.

Alongside this exhibition, Editions Martin de Halleux will publish a catalog, bringing together the works presented by Galerie Catherine Issert in Saint-Paul-de-Vence as well as those presented by Galerie Zlotowski in Paris. A text by Anne Bonnin introduces the dual exhibition. The catalog is the second volume of the collection launched last year by Galerie Zlotowski and Editions Martin de Halleux.