The Maison Galerie Hélène Aziza presents the exhibition by Gérard Uféras: A day at the museum until November 20th, 2024. It is introduced as follow.
Over the past decades, museums have taken an increasingly important place in our societies and our collective imagination, sparking massive interest in art and attracting an increasingly young audience. The modern museum has become a place where concerts and performances, conferences, and educational programs come together. Cultural tourism attracts millions of visitors who come to learn there or simply to stroll, to be ecstatic, and even sometimes… to fall asleep exhausted.
Gérard Uféras has been practicing his curiosity there since the age of twelve when, accompanied by two friends, all three living in the suburbs, they decided to discover Paris through its museums. This uninterrupted practice of museums sparked his passion for the visual arts, which, years later, led him to photography and enriched his outlook.
In this project, Gérard Uféras acts as an artist, anthropologist, and sociologist simultaneously. He observes, records, and analyzes what we see there with subtlety and humor. His study is much more than an intelligent and witty story about visitors to diverse museums—it offers each of us the opportunity to see ourselves in a new light and to reflect on our own relationship to art.
He started this work in 2016, primarily in Paris but also in New York, Moscow, London, Berlin, Brussels, Milan, Florence, Athens, Tel Aviv, Bern, Washington, and more, It remains a “Work in Progress.”
Gérard Uféras
From 1984, he began a regular collaboration with the newspaper Liberation, for which he produced numerous reports and portraits. The Newspaper organized his first exhibition. He participated in the creation of the Vu photo agency in 1986 and regularly publishes in the French and international press. In addition to photojournalism and portrait works, he realizes advertising campaigns, works for institutional communication and realizes fashion series. His work has been awarded numerous times and is part of the collections of the European House of Photography in Paris, the National Fund for Contemporary Art, the Central Union of Decorative Arts, the National Library of France, the National Gallery in London, the Élysée Museum in Lausanne, the Salzburg Festival in Austria, the Henkel collection in Germany, the House of Photography in Moscow… 2024 all of his works entered the collections of the MPP, Media Library of Heritage and Photography which preserves the photographic heritage of the State. His works are included with those of Willy Ronis who was his friend and those of his youthful wonders: André Kertesz and Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
Maison Galerie Hélène Aziza
19 rue Paul Fort
75014 Paris
Until Wednesday November 20, 2024
Every day from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
