Alicia Penalba. La sculpture entre terre et ciel

Musée Zadkine

Three years after the exhibition Chana Orloff. Sculpter l'époque, the musée Zadkine once again invites visitors to (re)discover the work of an important sculptor of the 20th century. Alicia Penalba (1913-1982), an artist of international renown, was born in Argentina but spent most of her career in France. The musée Zadkine, the first museum in France to devote an exhibition to her since her death, was ideally placed to pay tribute to the artist who made her debut in Paris, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, in the sculpture class run by Zadkine. Alternating chronological sections and thematic approaches, the exhibition places Penalba's work within the artistic context of the 1950s-1960s. It evokes the ties forged with other artists, such as Zadkine of course, but also Brancusi, Picasso and Matisse. It focuses on Penalba's totemic works, which combine monumentality and verticality and highlight the role of nature as a driving force behind creation. Penalba, marked in her childhood by the Argentine landscapes, never ceased to draw on them to invent sculptures with biomorphic forms evoking desert plants. Alicia Penalba's interest in the decorative arts, her desire to explore sculpture through different media – ceramics, tapestry – and different sizes, from the monumental to the miniature and to jewellery, is the other guiding thread of an exhibition that reveals an independent and talented creator who considerably renewed her art.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗