- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Brigitte Léal
František Kupka: Works from the Centre Georges Pompidou
František Kupka (1871-1957), born in Bohemia before moving to Paris in 1896, is considered one of the pioneers of abstract art. The author of an extensive and complex oeuvre, he trained in Symbolist circles and then moved towards the avant-garde movements that emerged in the first half of the 20th century.
The exhibition that we are presenting at the Fundació Joan Miró has been organised in collaboration with the Centre Georges Pompidou and draws on its rich holdings. It covers all the phases of the painter’s career in France and allows us to follow the plastic reflections that led him to adopt a non-figurative language in the years before the First World War. Over the course of almost six decades, Kupka’s paintings expressed his interest in organic and biophysical phenomena on his canvases, as well as human perception and the space-time equation. This line of research gave rise to a singular abstraction.
It could be said that Kupka was more faithful to the substance of his plastic research than to the form. He consequently did not hesitate to develop an artistic practice on various fronts, with results that defy simple visions of the emergence of abstraction. Kupka never felt comfortable with the limitations imposed by belonging to a particular movement. He therefore followed a personally distinct path that, although it brought him late recognition, made him one of the most exceptional figures of European modern art.
