Fondation is opening with 'Van Gogh Live!' exhibition
ARLES - “Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853–29 July 1890), lived in Arles from 20 February 2025 to 8 March 1889. That is almost 15 months, over 63 weeks, precisely 444 days. During his stay, he produced some 200 paintings, made over 100 drawings and watercolours, and wrote some 200 letters. The vast majority survive – a prodigal and quite astonishing outpouring, sustaining a pace that no other artist of the 19thcentury could match. This period in Arles is frequently called the zenith, the climax, the greatest flowering of Van Gogh’s decade of artistic activity”.
This presentation of the paintings of Van Gogh stimulates a fruitful dialogue centred on interrogation and reflection. The art critic and curator Bice Curiger is taking care of this major event.
The Fondation will now officially open in the Hôtel Léauteaud de Donines, a fifteenth-century mansion, situated in the town’s historic centre, which has been classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, and which has been through numerous transformations.
The Fondation is opening its doors with "Colours of the North, Colours of the South", curated by Sjaar van Heugten.
“In Van Gogh’s paintings, all is movement, all is animated. It’s also the way I look at things”.
Camille Henrot: “Vincent van Gogh’s work – as it is art –has ‘resistance’, ‘intensity’, ‘movement’, ‘conviction’ and ‘positivity’. His work, as it is art, is ‘autonomous’, and it is this autonomy that gives his oeuvre its beauty”.
Thomas Hirschhorn: “Colours of the North, Colours of the South” is the first of a series of exhibitions covering Van Gogh’s oeuvre. It follows the artist’s palettes from his early years in the Netherlands, through his exploration of theories of colour, especially that of Eugène Delacroix, then the influence of the old masters, but also of the impressionists and the late nineteenth-century avant-garde, up until his discovery of the light of the South and the intensity of the colours it brings out.