ARLES.- At the beginning of his career, Vincent van Gogh concentrated above all on drawing. In fact, for the first three years he did little else, convinced as he was that it would give him the foundation he needed to master the art of painting. As a result, his talent as a draughtsman emerged long before he became known as a painter. But drawing remained an important part of his artistic production, and the outstanding mastery demonstrated by his works on paper makes them an equal counterpart to his paintings.

The exhibition “Van Gogh Drawings: Influences and Innovations” looks at the influence of prints and drawings by other artists on Van Gogh’s drawings and his small graphic oeuvre. A representative body of his drawings and prints is thus complemented by a selection of images that inspired him at various stages of his career.

Van Gogh absorbed a multitude of influences and proceeded to assimilate them in works that are highly innovative, not just in style but often in technique as well. The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue pay close attention to these and other aspects of one of the most remarkable oeuvres of drawings of the 19th century.

ANNUAL LOAN FROM THE VAN GOGH MUSEUM IN AMSTERDAM
The Fondation has benefited since its opening from an annual loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, initiated between April 2014 and March 2015 with the painting Self-portrait with Pipe and Straw Hat. As from 1 April 2015, this first loan has been renewed with the presentation of Piles of French Novels, a littleknown work painted in 1887 in Paris. With its sketched brushwork and free-hand character, this composition reveals the influence of the “Japanese style” that Vincent would later develop further in Arles.

Piles of French Novels testifies to the importance that Vincent attached to books and reading. The volumes appear here like abstract ciphers in bright colours, floating above a surface made of pink brushstrokes, painted with great freedom and an extraordinary vivacity.

RONI HORN: “BUTTERFLY TO OBLIVION”
From 12 June to 20 September 2015
Roni Horn is one of the most important artists of today. In Arles she is presenting large-format works on paper and photographs alongside three new glass sculptures that fill the gallery space. Glass is experienced in her powerful cylindrical sculptures as a fascinatingly translucent volume, as a block of matter that one moment ago was liquid and is now solid. These sculptures reveal to our gaze an inner life infused with light and a subtle play of colour.

Drawing is the basis for Roni Horn’s artistic activities. In her large works on paper and photographs, we see the traces and interfaces of a structure determining the image. They are the result of Horn’s cutting up and then reassembling of drawn forms and thick loops of pigment on paper, or of photographic figures such as the series of white, blurred clown faces with eerie, luminous red mouths.

A shimmering optical play, surprisingly rich in suggestion and at times unsettling, is thereby kindled on the pictorial surface in a staccato rhythm of image formation.

Roni Horn’s art always revolves, too, around language, poetry and literature. She thereby often works with writers, such as Hélène Cixous and Anne Carson. In Arles Roni Horn is showing her latest series of drawings, Hack Wit, in which she cuts up English idiomatic expressions in order to make, from two familiar figures of speech, one that is strange and new. Letters and words are scraps that join together in the resulting expression in wild poetry, dancing between meaning and absurdity, recognition and virgin territory. Thus the title of the exhibition, “Butterfly to Oblivion”, goes back to the mutual assimilation of “A butterfly broken on the wheel” and “Consign to oblivion”.

TABAIMO: “AITAISEI-JOSEI”
From 12 June to 20 September 2015
The work of the artist Tabaimo, born in 1975 in Hyogo, Japan, demonstrates the fluidity of the relationships between the practice of drawing and the animation film, between Japanese woodcut prints of the Edo period and popular television of the 1970s, while also incorporating other references specific to the cultural history of Japan.

The young Japanese artist not only integrates the history of animation drawing into her art, but at the same time claims allegiance to the famous painter, printmaker and draughtsman Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), the distinctive style of whose woodcuts likewise influenced Van Gogh. Via the subtle alchemy of colour and line that potently infuses her animation film aitaisei-josei, created in 2015, Tabaimo breathes a presence and a movement into a nocturnal scene that has become the setting for exalted passions and surreal visions.

The film intersects the stories of two pairs of lovers: Ohatsu and Tokubei from The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Jap. Sonezaki Shinju), an 18th-century bunraku play for the puppet theatre written by Monzaemon Chikamatsu, and Miho and Yuichi, characters in the 2007 novel Villain (Jap. Akunin) by Shuichi Yoshida. The opening scene of the film shows a table and chair respectively personifying the beautiful courtesan Ohatsu and her lover Tokubei. They form a subtle contrast with Miho, whose spectral apparition sets off a series of strange activities inside the apartment. The world of inanimate objects becomes the receptacle of a feminine and sensitive look at the tragic destiny of two women in love.

The artist accompanies her installation with a series of drawings that are situated halfway between botanical illustrations and studies of human anatomy.