When, in 1877, Claude Monet moved to Paris in the New Athens district, he requested authorization to work in the Saint-Lazare station, which was its boundary. The location is ideal for this impressionist painting which has just emerged and whose 150th anniversary is being celebrated this year (Impression, rising sun, dates from 1874). Luminosity, mobility of the subject, clouds of steam and a radically modern motif give rise to La Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, a painting where color borders on abstraction to better express time changing speed.
Today, adjacent to Saint-Lazare station, the Grand Central, designed by architect Jacques Ferrier, an all-glass building which has housed the Ricard Foundation since 2021, brings a big breath of fresh air to an intensely urban neighborhood . The light passes through it, from the 2,400 slats of glass tinted from blue-green to light orange, in which the sky is reflected, to the pedestrian patio, from the tousled gardens which top it to the Cour Paul-Ricard where the (young) amateurs of art come with family and strollers to visit this contemporary foundation at heart. The theater of color awaits them there.
Also read Les Champs intenses by Mathilde Rosier at the Pernod-Ricard Foundation
Under the vast curtains hung by the German artist Ulla von Brandenburg, the eye is engaged by the play of primaries and complementaries. The matte poppy red borders on gypsy blue. Vast orange half-moons curve into a sea of turquoise. The green of the forests forms an oblique border with the blue of the sea. Black and emerald green compete for supremacy in a battle of forms which appeals to constructivism, which does not require explanations and expects the public to ‘appropriates knowledge through exploration and active learning. The color lifts the gaze upwards and all these drapes which fall from the sky form a changing spectacle, hypnotic, soothing, like nature, as long as we look at it when its scale exceeds man.
Born in Karlsruhe in 1974, on the Franco-German border, “in a family of the small German aristocracy but of liberal, even bohemian parents”, Ulla von Brandenburg is an artist on the French scene. After training in scenography in Karlsruhe and a brief foray into the theater world, she trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. She has lived in Paris since 2005, then, to regain all her living space and by “daydreaming of the countryside”, on the borders of Île-de-France. Artist of theatrical drapery and reinvented rite, Ulla von Brandenburg has this intuitive and feminine connection with the land, the forest, the cycle of life of which man is only a part. Even the most mineral city cannot resist it.
It had already fascinated the 11 Lyon Biennale in 2011, under the magic wand of its young curator, the Argentine Victoria Noorthoorn, with a sumptuous curtain fall at La Sucrière. At the Palais de Tokyo, in 2020, her installation “Das Was Ist” played on “the dramaturgy of the curtain” which she sublimates through the scale, the suspension in the void, the magnificent work of artisanal, past, associated color. Then the color continues. With all the audacity of the palette, the Ricard Foundation hangs on picture rails buttercup yellow, hard blue, pale blue, purple, dark red, pine green, the almost pop paintings of Farah Atassi, born in Brussels in 1981.
Also readColette Barbier: “If the Pernod Ricard Foundation were a person, it would be generous, curious, and without preconceptions”
Winner of the Jean-François-Prat prize in 2012, she was nominated for the Marcel-Duchamp prize in 2013 before leaving for a residency at the International Studio
“La société des spectacles, with Farah Atassi and Ulla von Brandenburg”, until April 20 at the Ricard Corporate Foundation, Paris (8th).
