Yves Bélorgey — Cités-jardins — Xippas Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 7 → March 4, 2023

We are happy to announce Yves Bélorgey’s latest solo exhibition presenting his pigment paintings for the first time in Paris. Entitled “Cités-Jardins” [Garden City Estate], it embarks on an “investigation” into an architectural utopia that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, but which today has been abandoned. This idea, almost visionary in scope, envisaged a “future town” as an alternative to the cacophony of the industrial age, and set out a model of a housing project that would be “closer to the land” and include a space to be cultivated and shared. By integrating a garden into a housing complex, it would allow its inhabitants an escape from suffocation as well as from alienation…

Exhibition view Yves Bélorgey, Cités-jardins, Xippas Paris, 2023

…Over a number of years, Yves Bélorgey’s practice has been punctuated by a series of small “revolutions” that he has sought to push further and further. Although he has remained faithful to the subject that has preoccupied him since the 1990s — the architecture of collective housing projects that he documents, following a programme initiated by a “fictitious public commission” — the methodical nature of his approach has been disrupted on several occasions. He has also invented a new technique that involves applying dry pigments directly on the canvas. Human figures have also entered his compositions, breathing life and movement into them. Finally, the depictions themselves have been altered by the incorporation of an abstract element into the compositions, filtering the image represented through a kind of latticework grid. Under the influence of these innovations and changes, a new subject has taken form: following in the footsteps of the German architect Bruno Taut, Yves Bélorgey has begun to explore and even resurrect the idea of the garden city estate, raising the issues around the subject as well as his painting itself.

Exhibition view Yves Bélorgey, Cités-jardins, Xippas Paris, 2023

Yves Bélorgey (b.1960) lives and works in Montreuil in the Paris suburbs.

From the 1990s onwards Yves Bélorgey developed an interest in suburban landscapes, and more precisely the collective architecture of large housing estates built between 1950 and 1970. In response to a fictive public commission to “paint communal buildings as documents”, he began a vast painting project to create a methodical and nostalgic archive of an entire neglected segment of modernist architecture as well as an abandoned social project.

Yves Bélorgey’s work was subject of solo exhibitions in numerous institutions, such as: Le Printemps de Septembre, CIAM — La Fabrique, Toulouse, France (2021); Kunstverein Heilbronn, Germany (2019); Centre d’art Le19, Montbéliard, France (2017); Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon, Sérignan (2012); Ulm Kunstlerhaus in Germany (2012); Musée National d’Art Contemporain, Bucarest, Roumania (2011). In 2012, the Mamco of Geneva has organized a first retrospective featuring almost a hundred of his artworks.

Public collections (selection): Mamco, Geneva, Switzerland; FNAC, Paris, France, FRAC Bretagne, FRAC Franche-Comté, FRAC Limousin, FRAC Pays de la Loire, FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, FRAC Rhône-Alpes; Société Générale, city of Lyon ; city of Montreuil.