On the occasion of the 11th edition of Festival PhotoSaintGermain, the galleries Le Minotaure and Lucas Ratton have joined together to present a selection of surrealist photographs alongside objects of tribal art from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
Through this perspective, the exhibition echoes the important primitivist tradition that has marked the artistic modernity and forged so many ties between modern art and so-called “primitive” art. Indeed, we know the central place that these objects took in the imagination and aesthetics of the surrealists, but also in the collections of artists and poets of the movement. With the dream, the unconscious and other meanders of the human soul that psychoanalysis began to reveal, the Other, that is to say the elsewhere, the distant, was an object of fascination and a major source of inspiration for these artists. Masks, statues, ritual or everyday objects, architectural elements gave a new breath to their creation and even took place within the photographic compositions of some of them (such as the famous portrait Noire et Blanche by Man Ray in 1926, representing Kiki de Montparnasse holding close to her an African Baoulé mask). However, the exhibition will not be a presentation of surrealist photographs setting in scene these objects but a proposal of correspondences, visual and/or symbolic, between these objects and surrealist photographs of different techniques and genres (rayographs, solarfix, microphotography, poster project...). In that respect, one will be able to see, hung on the walls of the Lucas Ratton gallery, works of major photographers such as Ilse Bing, Erwin Blumenfeld, Theodor Brauner, Edmund Kesting or Man Ray, to name but a few, alongside objects of exceptional plastic, from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and British Columbia.
Galerie Le Minotaure
The Galerie Le Minotaure, created in 2002, is situated Rue des Beaux-Arts, at the former address of the famous bookshop from whom it preserved its name. His founder, Benoit Sapiro, is fascinated by Russian and Central Europe artists of the first half of the 20th century. Benoit Sapiro dedicated himself to helping rediscover the first half of the 20th Century Russian and Central Europe artists for more than twenty years, with a constant and passionated action.
Galerie Lucas Ratton
The Galerie Lucas Ratton presents objects from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and British Columbia. For Lucas, this is all about perpetuating the family tradition — established by his great uncle Charles Ratton and his grandfather Maurice — of confrontation and dialogue between extra-European arts and modern and contemporary arts.