Everytime a knot is undone, a god is released
Sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud
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For the first time, eight Parisian museums join forces to celebrate an artist during her lifetime. Barbara Chase-Riboud's (born 1939) career spans seven decades, during which she traveled the world and developed an unparalleled mastery of form. This exhibition will present a series of monumental sculptures, which demonstrate the power of bronze and silk, at the heart of the sculptor's work, weaving links between cultures, histories, and materials.
Everytime a Knot is undone, A God is Released, named after Barbara Chase-Riboud's collection of poetry, published in 2014 is an exhibition which like no other will offer the public a constellation of encounters with her work: sculptures, drawings and poems, created from 1958 to the present. Each museum presentation weaves a story illuminating its relationship to the art of Barbara Chase-Riboud, through works selected specifically to engage with the distinct museographic routes and the architecture of each museum.
Over the past seventy years, Barbara Chase-Riboud has charted new paths in sculpture, juxtaposing the most prestigious, materials - bronze, with silk and wool, creating works where solidity and fluidity are not in contradiction but innovate a form, referencing both human and abstract, constantly futuristic while unearthing hidden histories.
For the first time since her solo exhibition at Musee d'Art Moderne in 1974, Barbara Chase-Riboud's mastery of bronze and silk will be the subject of aesthetic discourse at the museums in the city of light, where she has been a resident since 1961.
This multi-museum exhibition highlights the exchanges and encounters of an artist who lives and creates, in the present, with the art of the past. Through the gaze of Barbara Chase-Riboud, through this dialogue of unprecedented works, a rich artistic landscape is also offered to us, where the relevance of heritage for a major figure in contemporary sculpture is demonstrated. This unprecedented museum initiative will allow us to reread the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud in the context of her life and creation in Paris, which she recounts in her memoir, I Always Knew.
Sponsored by the Ford Foundation and Terra Foundation for American Art, and organized by Erin Jenoa Gilbert and Donatien Grau, Director of Contemporary Programs at the Louvre, Barbara Chase-Riboud. Everytime a Knot is undone, A God is Released is the first multi-museum exhibition of a single artist to be presented in Paris during their lifetime.
AT CENTRE POMPIDOU
In dialogue with the contemporary artists in the National Museum of Modern Art collection, this installation brings together a selection of monumental works such as Malcolm X from several discrete series offering an overview of the diversity of her ouvre.
AT MUSÉE NATIONAL DES ARTS ASIATIQUES - GUIMET
The journey she undertook in 1965 would have a profound impact on Barbara Chase-Riboud's artistic practice. Daily life in Maoist China intrigued her as much as the millennia-old vestiges, and immediately required her to shift her gaze to the architecture and art surrounding her. This journey is consecrated in the sculpture Mao's Organ, which is presented at the Guimet museum alongside Chinese seals from her personal collection and photographs Marc Riboud shot during this trip.
AT MUSÉE DU LOUVRE
For the first time, under the pyramid, the sculpture of an artist is presented: Barbara Chase-Riboud invites us to enter her work of monumentality and fragility with Gold Column. In the galleries, two works from the Cleopatra series will be exhibited in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities and in Egyptian Antiquities, illuminating the epic narrative of the last sovereign of ancient, Greek Egypt.
AT MUSEE D'ORSAY
At the Salon de l'Horloge, an emblem place of modernity, a presentation of five aluminum and silk sculptures will interrogate our concept of time, sacred geometry and femininity in the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud.
AT MUSEE DU QUAI BRANLY - JACQUES CHIRAC
At the entrance to the Collections, the exhibition of a monumental sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud. The presentation of this work, which reflects material and formal knowledge of African artistic practices, reveals the affinities between the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud, the collections and the architecture of the museum.
AT PALAIS DE LA PORTE DORÉE
The Salon des Lacques is a masterpiece of Art Deco, a period that fascinated the artist. Two of Chase-Riboud's early sculptures, questioning colonial interactions and the feeling of distance from home, will echo the sumptuous lacquer panels of Jean Dunand, where matte and gloss meet in a mirror effect.
AT PALAIS DE TOKYO
Barbara Chase-Riboud Standing Women of Venice was concieved in relationship with Giacometti's The Walking Man: each unique totemic sculpture, is dedicated to a female poet Chase-Riboud admires. This sculptural series is juxtaposed by the presentation of a series of White Drawings illegible lyrical texts pierced through paper, demonstrating the dexterity Barbara Chase-Riboud, herself a sculptor and poet.
AT LA CITE DE LA MUSIQUE - PHILHARMONIE DE PARIS
At the entrance of the Philharmonie Barbara Chase-Riboud continues her decades long series devoted to musicians, the last being dedicated to the legendary Joséphine Baker.
BIOGRAPHY OF BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD
At age 15 Barbara Chase-Riboud became youngest artist to enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. After a year in Rome and Egypt as a John Hay Whitney Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, in 1960 Barbara Chase-Riboud became the first Black Woman to graduate with an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture.
In 1999, Barbara Chase-Riboud became the first woman and living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during her lifetime. Winner of numerous awards, in 1996 she received the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2021, she received the AWARE Award for Outstanding Merit and the Simon and Cino and Del Duca Foundation Art Award. In 2022, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center of the French Legion of Honor.
Her works have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, the Berkeley Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tate Modern, the Glenstone Museum, Yale University Art Museum, Colby College Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in France by the National Collection of Plastic Arts.
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