Domela

Exhibition at Le Minotaure Gallery, Paris, 4 February - 29 April 2023

The Dutch artist César Domela (1900-1992) began his career in the first half of the 1920s as a member of the De Stijl group. He later moved away from the principles of neoplasticism and gradually abandoned oil painting to create reliefs that reconcile geometry and organicism, becoming one of the undisputed masters of the genre.

After several stays in Berlin, Domela settled permanently in Paris in 1933. He became a member of Cercle et Carré, then of Abstraction Création, groups for which he actively contributed to the reviews. During the war, when artistic activity in Paris was considerably reduced, he was regularly present at the Jeanne Bucher gallery, which was creating a welcoming space for the emerging Second School of Paris. In February 1944, he exhibited there alongside Nicolas de Staël and Wassily Kandinsky.

Comprising more than 50 pieces, many of them of museum quality, this exhibition catalogue covers these different periods of Domela's work as well as the diversity of media and techniques he explored in his work: photographs, photomontages, paintings, sculptures, but above all reliefs, which constitute the culmination of his earlier experiments and the main axis of his career.