The Musée d’art moderne André Malraux (MuMa) in Le Havre, Gilles’s birthplace, has given Pierre & Gilles carte blanche for the second half of a major retrospective co-organized with the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels which held an exhibition devoted to the French photographer–painter duo from February 16 to May 14, 2017.
Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard first met forty years ago, and shortly thereafter formed an artistic duo known as Pierre & Gilles. Four decades of romantic and artistic partnership gave rise to portraits combining photography and painting: now legendary images that draw on art and popular culture. Madonna, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Stromae, Isabelle Huppert, as well as family and friends posing as sailors or soldiers, have passed before the couple’s camera to be immortalized on film then idealized by the paintbrush in a unique style that brilliantly brings together various religious, mythological, or fairy tale references while firmly anchoring them in contemporary reality.
At the MuMa, Pierre & Gilles have created a site-specific installation in the nave of the museum, using beach huts typically encountered in the city. They revised the ground-floor display by selecting works from the museum’s rich collections. To better capture the artists’ connections with the city of Le Havre, a “cabinet of curiosities” presents a collection of various personal objects, from drawings and juvenilia, and works by local painters, gathered in a mise-en-scène whose secrets only Pierre & Gilles know how to unlock.
Expertly curated by Sophie Duplaix, chief curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou (Paris), the exhibition brings together over 80 works dating from the late 1970s to the present and grouped thematically.
Pierre et Gilles, Clair-obscur
May 27 to August 20, 2017
MuMa – Musée d’art moderne André Malraux
2 Boulevard Clemenceau
76600 Le Havre
France
