Fermin Aguayo — Présence habitée — Présence réfléchie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 11 → July 13, 2012

The gallery presents a retrospective exhibition of the Spanish painter Fermin Aguayo entitled “Inhabited Presence, Reflected Presence” at both the right bank and left bank spaces of the Gallery.

This exhibition retraces the itinerary of a great painter who died prematurely in 1977 at the age of 51, and whom the gallery has promoted ever since the 1950s.Through a selection of Aguayo’s major works along with a few never before seen works on paper, the exhibition proposes to make known to a wider public an artist who assumed his destiny as a painter and who sought, with nobility and self-restraint, neither to please nor to convince but to explore the constants of the human condition.In the judgment of Dora Vallier, formed in her approach to painting by Christian Zervos :

“Aguayo is to painting what Giacometti succeeded in doing in sculpture.”

Following in the footsteps of a retrospective dedicated to him a few years ago by the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, it is the first exhibition in France to bring together such a large number of his major works, some of them for the first time. The works exhibited in the historical space of the gallery situated rue de Seine, will provide the public with an overview of the different phases and themes of the artist’s lifework, which are developed fully in the continuing exhibition rue de Saintonge, from his earliest paintings of the mid 1940s to the last paintings of 1975, two years before his death. Included in the exhibition are some rare works on paper unseen publicly before.

More than thirty years after his, this exhibition is intended as a rehabilitation of a great painter who proves that painting is fundamentally alive.