René Iché : L'art En Lutte

Exhibition at La Piscine, Roubaix, 24 June - 3 September 2023 ;
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper, 23 November 2023 - 19 February 2024 ;
Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, 30 March - 30 June 2024

A veteran of the First World War and a committed artist close to Apollinaire and Max Jacob, René Iché (1897-1954) is considered to be one of the most remarkable representatives of modern French sculpture and, after the war, of the European Figuration movement.

Iché's aesthetic and technical research went hand in hand with a more general reflection on the artist's place in society and history. The artist has developed an erudite body of work that can be read on several levels, questioning his intimate experiences in order to create a body of work with universal appeal. The motif of struggle, understood as carnal hand-to-hand combat or as struggle, resistance or defence of a cause, is at the heart of his work.

This exhibition catalogue brings together works from René Iché's family collection, as well as from public and private collections, enabling us to rediscover a key player on the twentieth-century French art scene. The book is structured around the three main sections of the exhibition: Intimate, Literature and Poetry, War(s) and Commitments.