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September 7 – November 18, 2006
JEAN MIOTTE
Spirit of Defiance
Jean Miotte: Insurrection. Acryl on canvas. 1996.
The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, is pleased
to announce the opening of its Fall season with the exhibition,
Miotte: Spirit of Defiance, organized on the occasion of the artist’s
eightieth birthday. The exhibition, which spans all three floors
of the museum, charts the chronological and formal development of
Miotte’s work in its impressive variety. From his early figurative
works, to the first explosions of color that marked his early abstraction,
to the more minimal black and white works, to the haunting beauty
of the calligraphic strokes on raw canvas- the selections reveal
an artist constantly expanding the thresholds of discovery within
his chosen practice. Works have also been included to show his experimentation
in different media including sculpture, ceramics, graphics and tapestry
as well as his set designs for the ballet with which his gestural
strokes have such affinity.
Jean Miotte’s vocation as an artist began in the aftermath
of World War II. The new paradigms of perception that transformed
the landscape of art in the second half of the twentieth century
have been well documented. With social institutions discredited
as enablers of nothing but chaos (and given our current political
climate we sadly again are faced with similar disillusion) the artist
– be it painter, writer, philosopher- moved into a somewhat
shamanistic role. An existentialist, inner, private response, radically
replaced the Western rationalist traditions of social organization
and a progressive view of history. Authenticity and meaning could
only be located, provisionally and unstably, in the individual,
fought for continually in each creative act of self-realization.
Within this context, the artist as creator and painting, by and
in itself, now seemed more potent, more capable of moral meaning
than the external realities of landscape, politics and society.
There emerged, almost simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic,
a vindication of the gestural in painting. The gesture was the existential
equivalent to the action that led to self-awakening. A contemporary
of such artists as Shiraga Kasuo, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Emil Schumacher,
Miotte championed the individual freedom of the artist as expressed
through gestural brushstroke and thick pools of color. As Miotte
has commented, “My painting is a projection, a succession
of acute moments where creation occurs in the midst of spiritual
tension and as a result of inner conflicts.”
The Spirit of Defiance of the exhibition’s title has continued
to inform Miotte’s artistic trajectory. Refusing to conform
to the changing demands of the art market, he has worked to express
the limitless possibilities of the gestural line and color. In the
spirit of the jazz improvisations, which have always inspired him
with its spirit of freedom and improvisation, Miotte has sounded
in his painting the full range of human emotion, ranging from despair
to an utter wonder at the beauty of creation. The deep sense of
humanity which his works evoke cross the boundaries of race and
geography, an appeal which is chronicled in his international exhibition
history. Miotte’s paintings have been shown extensively throughout
the Far East including one-man shows in the national museums of
Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, and Manila. Indeed, Miotte
was the first western artist invited to show in post-Mao Beijing
in 1980. Miotte continues to be widely exhibited in Europe. Most
recently an exhibition of some 80 works has travelled to museums
in Spain, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland
and Germany.
Miotte has exhibited regularly in New York since 1962 and is included
in many important private and public collections including the Guggenheim
Museum. In 2002 the Miotte foundation was established at the Chelsea
Art Museum. The foundation, as well as housing substantial holdings
of Miotte’s work, supports both a continued historical investigation
of the trans-national movement of art autre, and a venue for innovative
exhibitions which testify to Abstraction’s continued relevance
and power in postmodern vocabulary.
A new monograph on Miotte will be published on the occasion of the
exhibition.
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