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Végétal- L'école de la beauté

Végétal- L'école de la beauté : ©MaisonChaumet   


The exhibition


Végétal – The School of Beauty


If we were to remember only one thing, it is the finesse of the vegetable kingdom. At the Beaux-Arts in Paris, learning used to go through reproduction, with recurring patterns given by nature. In collaboration with Chaumet, the exhibition presents this naturalistic relationship to the plant through jewellery creations, among a hundred pieces from the jewellery house’s collection, including drawings and models, as well as paintings, photographs and historical textile works, like a vast thousand-flower tapestry dating from a sixteenth century concluding the exhibition with a bath of greenery. Opening through a cardboard forest of Eva Jospin standing out from the darkness, epochs, styles and creative mediums meet room after room. Hung in such close proximity that it allows visitors to detail them, the works highlight the naturalist inspiration of the jewels. The depiction of an ear of wheat thus gives rise to dissimilar views: a documentary in black and white of a photograph by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, it is full of colors in the diadem of François-Regnault Nitot, set with gold, silver and diamonds in 1811. Sensory, the exhibition also evokes hearing. A noise echoes, like a wind that would make wheat sing: the artist Zimoun surprises with his installation of trembling cartons. Called to imagine a rural vision listening to this sound, the visitor suddenly leaves, seeing on the first floor this broom of animated cardboard.
If the plant is at the origin of the living, the drawing is at the origin of the work. Wandering around the exhibition floor, in the form of a cabinet of curiosities, the idea is established that museum collections identify, through the plant, the beginnings of the greatest. Two examples: Otto Dix practicing in 1912 at the reproduction of an iris or Chaumet exhibiting his first sketches of brooches. Marc Jeanson, botanist and curator of the exhibition, gives Végétal the possibility to find art and nature through his double cap.

Margaux Acosta


Végétal – The School of Beauty. Maison Chaumet and the Beaux-arts de Paris. June 16 to September 4, 2022

When


16/06/2022 - 04/09/2022

Artists