Galerie Rachel Hardouin is the first gallery to exhibit in Paris the original painted prints of Irène Jonas on Rosa Bonheur.
Irène Jonas’ exhibition runs alongside the major retrospective devoted to Rosa Bonheur at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, until January 15, 2023. Rosa Bonheur’s works have been presented at the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, birthplace of Rosa Bonheur, until September 18th.
Ahead of the bicentenary of the birth of Rosa Bonheur and the events planned throughout the year, Irène Jonas, also a sociologist, took part in 2021 in the “Ile-de-France” program of writers’ residences. She spent several stays, in Thomery, at the Château de Rosa Bonheur, near the forest of Fontainebleau.
This place where the animal painter lived was renovated by the latter during the year 1859. The castle and its park have undergone very few transformations since then, constituting a rare heritage testimony.
Irène Jonas was welcomed there to help raise awareness of Rosa Bonheur and female creation. She did some writing work there. She also took advantage of a shoot in period costumes to capture the spirit of the place.
As in most of her work, Irène Jonas questions memory, the traces of a personal and collective history. It is by enhancing her photographic prints directly on their surface with oil that Irène Jonas enhances this memory with colors.
We navigate between past and present. The shots are contemporary, the manual pictorial process tells us of a bygone era; time of which we become witnesses. The temporal and spatial indeterminacy that runs through much of Irène Jonas’ work is at the heart of this series.
Rosa Bonheur’s feminist commitment is no stranger to Irène Jonas’ choice to invest in this artistic residency. As a sociologist, she has published several articles on gender and is carrying out a study on women photographers.
The meeting also often invites itself in the time of the creation of Irène Jonas.
And she knows how to handle it.
Here, without being informed of the presence of the extras of a documentary – fiction which was filmed in the castle where Rosa Bonheur lived, she was there… The magic and the spirit of Rosa Bonheur took hold. Irène captured them in her viewfinder, when the shot was taken, already imagining the colors and scents she would share with the public.
Irène Jonas is a photographer and sociologist.
Born in 1957, she lives in Paris and Guilvinec in southern Finistère. She joined the agence révélateur in 2016.
Through her professions as a sociologist and photographer, writing and the image have always been present in her professional life. However, she has freed herself from sociological writing and photographic reporting, in order to develop a form of personal expression.
For the past ten years, she has focused her personal and artistic research on fine art photography.
www.irenejonas.myportfolio.com
www.agencerevelateur.fr
www.15martel.com
Exhibition
Irène Jonas : Rosa Bonheur… Réminiscences
October 11-30, 2022
Galerie Rachel Hardouin / 15 curiosity & experiences
15 rue Martel – 75010 Paris
www.15martel.com
Conference Saturday October 15 at 5:30 p.m. “Louis Prieur, photographer” by Markus. A. Castor, art historian at the German Center for Art History – DFK Paris, and Marthje Sagewitz, University of Leipzig
Book
Irène Jonas, Lettres à Rosa B.
Éditions de Juillet.
Size: 22 x 19 cm
124 color pages
54 photographs.
Swiss binding with black stitching
Retail price: €35
www.editionsdejuillet.com
