The European painting exhibition L'invisible vu will open to public on September 6th, 2019, at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum. By showing up 44 groups works of 19 artists, the exhibition offers a look at the individual exploring road of the European artists after the Second World War. From the prevailing of lyric abstractionism over the European continent in 1940s to geometric abstractionism got its growth, exhibition follow this path to rethink the connection between their individual creation and the context of the era. Sylvain Amic is the curator of the exhibition.

L'invisible vu, the exhibition title is not about the unknown on
the layer of visual, but emphasizes the approach and the means that artists applied to their creation. Then postwar existentialist philosophy influenced the new generation of artists in that period, they started to pay attention to the free expression of individuals and reflects on the predicament of their era. They tried to redefine themselves and againsted to previous geometric abstraction and any kind of painting that was restrained and limited by any theories. “Personal feeling” and “internal need” are the main topics in their works. The exhibition conveys these creative ideas through the works of Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Arpad Szenes and Jean Dubuffet, etc.

For most of those artists, like Josef Sima said in an interview: “Painting will give us another experience of reality (not only visual sense), it leads us to listening to what we can see and drawing what is invisible.” Therefore, their works become a trace of the very personalized realities, expressing the internal inevitability. The poem for gesture, the lament for color —— embracing these faiths, artists tried to express a real impulsion, to remove the abstraction from their aesthetic inertia and to depict an antagonistic emotion.


* The exhibition will open for free on September, 7th, 2019, and will run until October, 20th, 2019.