Mondrian

‘Nature moves me profoundly. Only I paint it in a different manner.’ Piet Mondrian

This immersive exhibition presents Mondrian’s iconic works, composed of squares of primary colour, which have long inspired artists of every kind and influenced pop culture. Graphic design, fashion, design, architecture, music… Mondrian created an aesthetic and timeless grammar that opened the way to abstraction. What lies behind this apparent minimalism and these bright and bold paintings? In an interplay of horizontal and vertical lines and moving from the figurative to the abstract, this immersive exhibition follows the artistic development of the painter, who broke away from traditional painting and immersed himself in visionary painting: Neoplasticism.

Like his life, his art was permeated by the upheavals at the beginning of the twentieth century: the change from candlelight to fluorescent lighting; from Calvinist austerity to the emergence of a modern rhythmic music jazz; and from the linear Dutch landscapes to the dizzyingly high skyscrapers in Manhattan… Mondrian’s life is illustrated by these major opposing dynamics, which, once expressed on the canvas, find a perfect equilibrium, that is magnified by the monumental exhibition areas in the Carrières des Lumières.

Naturalistic, Fauve, Pointillist, Cubist, Abstract … each period is gradually freed of the superfluous in order to express ‘general beauty’ in painting. This immersive experience, divided into five sections, retraces the path to visual simplification: the contrast of the Dutch sunsets, the power of colour that broke away from realism, the dynamics created by the lines that became rigid, the proportion of the surfaces in his Parisian studio, and the boundless energy of his work in New York.

Listen to the playlist of the exhibition