From 13 April to 12 May 2018
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
Endre Rozsda (Mohács, Hungary 1913 – Paris 1999) created a personal and secret body of work on the borders of various artistic movements, rejecting the distinction between abstraction and figuration, whose essential subject is the idea of time.
In 1938 he was dazzled by a concert by Béla Bartók, which revealed his own modernity to him. He came to Paris, where he met Vieira da Silva, Giacometti and Picasso, and became friends with Françoise Gilot.
Persecuted by Nazism, he returned to Hungary, where he was trapped by Stalinism; in 1957 Rozsda decided to settle in France for good. André Breton wrote the preface to the catalogue of his first exhibition at the Galerie Fürstenberg and, in 1964, Marcel Duchamp awarded him the Copley Prize.
Supported by enlightened art lovers, Rozsda pursued his work in the privacy of his studio, far from the art market. He could spend several years on a painting “without bowing to the demands of fashion”, as Jack Lang noted. He painted and drew tirelessly until the end of his days at the Bateau-Lavoir.
After the retrospective ROZSDA le temps retrouvé, shown last June at the Orangerie du Sénat, the Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles presents the exhibition ROZSDA Reunion, in which the Paris public will be able to rediscover this exceptional body of work.
“REUNION”
It is first of all a Reunion with the city of Paris, adopted and loved by Rozsda, and tirelessly explored with pencil and camera. A Reunion, too, with the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, where André Breton had presented his canvases for the first time in 1957, on place Fürstenberg in Simone Collinet’s gallery, the very gallery where Joyce Mansour presented Rozsda’s last public exhibition in 1963.
A Reunion, next, with the works Rozsda had hidden from the public since 1963, of which the Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles offers us a fine selection.
Finally, the Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles allows us a Reunion with Rozsda’s wandering spirit: it stands at the bottom of rue de Seine, just opposite rue des Beaux-Arts, with a view of the Académie des Arts, the former Minotaure bookshop and the Hôtel des Beaux-Arts, where Rozsda had met Jorge Luis Borges.
Artist: Endre Rozsda