PARIS.- Azzedine Alaïa presents to the public the exhibition Christoph von Weyhe, Au silence, featuring, from June 23rd to August 7th, a wide range of the artist’s large-scale gouaches. This is his first major monographic exhibition.

Christoph von Weyhe was born in 1937 in Halle (saale). He lives and works in Paris and Hamburg. After graduating from the École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1961, he began to work with feather, in order to seize the image of his dream-like landscapes. For thirty-five years, he has been returning to the place where he grew up – the Hamburg harbour – and transcribing it into painting. Christoph von Weyhe first captures the instant with gouache, and then works on reinventing his initial sensation for months, and even years.

Most of the gouaches have never been shown, and are being presented for the first time: they are works of instantaneous sensation, painted amidst the silence of the night, transposing the intensity of what is lived by the artist at the moment of creating in the harbour. paper is laid on the ground, and the artist there pays a tribute to the poetry and the harmony of the painterly moment. These works, made on a single evening, represent matrices for a transformation onto canvas which will take much more time.

The viewer will discover the vision of a discreet, enigmatic artist, whose work has remained for decades in the secret of his studio. encouraged by artist, writer and musician friends, who saw in his perseverance the elaboration of a methodology, insensitive to fashions and trends, a rare honesty and relevance, the artist is now ready to exhibit them and make them public. The title of the exhibition, taken from a poem by Hölderlin, transcribes this inner life and this relation to poetry – a poem the painter holds dear and keeps in his mind when realising those very gouaches.

Recent exhibitions include: a contribution to “International Laundry 2”, invited by Mike Bouchet, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt/Main, 2015; a solo exhibition at Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt/ Main, 2015; an invitation by Tatiana Trouvé at Galerie Johann König, Berlin, 2016 ; and a contribution to Frequent Long Walks, the exhibition organised by Hannah Barry Gallery in London around Robert Walser, in March-April 2016.

« Au silence » is accompanied by a book of the same title, edited by Donatien Grau and published jointly by Association Azzedine Alaïa and Actes sud, containing the first scholarly approach of the artist’s oeuvre. The book consists in a foreword by Nobel Laureate patrick Modiano, a conversation between Christoph von Weyhe and Tatiana Trouvé, essays by Éric de Chassey, Emanuele Coccia, Maël Renouard and Jean-philippe Toussaint, artistic hommages by Paul McCarthy, Luigi Serafini and Vladimir Spivakov.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Galerie Éric Dupont, which presents a display of Christoph von Weyhe’s recent works.