Writings – Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles

Van Gogh Manifesto

service editions — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 09:28:40 +0000

VAN GOGH MANIFESTO

To consider Van Gogh in dialogue with contemporary art.

To take a fresh look at the past, by liberating the artists and artworks that have been tamed, classified and placed in labelled boxes.

To extend our artistic references to visual popular culture, thus opening up unexpected perspectives.

Drawing from contemporary art, avant-garde artists who have made their mark on art history and even the popular arts, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles presents exhibitions that, like cinematographic montages, bring together what is normally kept apart. The premise of this hybrid space is not artistic purity; to the contrary, it strives to produce something “impure”, to bring about a clash or an unexpected complicity.

VAN GOGH MANIFESTO looks back over the curatorial work of Bice Curiger, led by one desire: to sharpen our gaze on art and the world, enlivening it with renewed vitality.

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, VAN GOGH MANIFESTO invites you to discover a unique artistic site through exhibition photographs, chronologies and original texts. Jean de Loisy, Suzanne von Falkenhausen and Bice Curiger describe their relationship with the Fondation and outline the artistic and philosophical paths taken since 2014.

The Sower. On Contemporary Nature

service editions — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 14:46:51 +0000

Vincent van Gogh completed and signed Sower with Setting Sun on or around 25 November 1888. The culmination of a lengthy preoccupation with the sower motif, the canvas condenses the various influences animating the artist as well as his intensive interrogations of painting. This resolutely modern work can also be described as such thanks to the act represented within it and to the equivalence established between the man and the tree.

In a highly original text combining philosophical essay and agricultural treatise, Emanuele Coccia takes a bold look at Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece. What emerges are unexpected and illuminating affinities between sower and artist, agriculture and painting, landscape and museum, inviting us to rethink the system of relationships between species. Art, which is no longer the prerogative of humans, can finally be returned to the living beings making up our landscapes.

Van Gogh and Saint Augustine: Parallels and Affinities

service editions — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 12:52:26 +0000

Saint Augustine and Vincent van Gogh: two individuals outside the mainstream whose extraordinary lives were marked by momentous progression. In a literary talk held at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Etel Adnan retraced the paths of these two men—one towards the divine, the other towards art. She thus underlined the affinities between their journeys, as discernible in their writings. Drawing upon Augustine’s Confessions and Vincent’s letters to his brother Theo, Etel Adnan reveals the existential and spiritual soul-searching by the saint and the artist, their passions and their insatiable quest for the “other”, be it God or a human brother.