Image: Centre Pompidou-Metz
The Centre Pompidou-Metz presents ‘Séraphine Louis. De Senlis et sans rivale’ as the first truly large-scale international retrospective devoted to Séraphine Louis. Séraphine Louis, known as ‘de Senlis,’ lived from 1864 to 1942.
The retrospective brings together more than 90 works from the approximately 100 works by the artist that are currently catalogued. Its curator is Elia Biezunski, a research officer and curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.
The exhibition places Louis on the margins of the avant-gardes of the 20th century and presents her as having developed a visual language of remarkable formal freedom.
The motifs described include bristling leaves resembling feathers and embedded with strange eyes, twisting branches, and gleaming corollas scattered with a multitude of hypnotic points.
The exhibition describes an evolution in which the compositions, initially fragile and floating, become enriched over time by a swirling movement that carries the eye into an abundance of forms and colors.
