1. Installation view of the exhibition "François Ristori",
presented at the MAMCO
François Ristori - The man defined
by others with one motif
Until the end of June, the MAMCO (basically the Contemporary Art Museum of Geneva) present the works of François Ristori (1936-2015), an artist know for his blue, white and red works made with geometric shapes. But how does it come to be? The MAMCO tries to respond to those questions and many others with the help of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Fonds de dotation Ristori in Paris.
2. Installation view of the exhibition"François Ristori",
presented at the MAMCO
The man
François Ristori was born on March 7 1936 in Eu in Seine-Maritime, his a French painter who jointed the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Amiens between 1954 and 1956. And after he returned from his military service in Algeria, he moved to Paris to attend three additional years of study at the Beaux-Arts between 1959 and 1962.
Two years later he had his first residency at the Casa de Velázquez, where he stayed until 1964. Four years later, he left for Canada as a scholarship holder of the Council for the Arts for six months until he helped the art group BMPT, composed of Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni, and he developed his working method he will be known for his whole life.
"Hexagonal traces-/forms generating each other, alternately in blue, in red, in white, until they occupy the whole of a surface, obtained one after the other, from a hexagon of a previously established frame, by intervening systematically on each of the sides, according to a method which consists in reiterating the same action-tracing which is always carried out according to the same process and according to determined principles, between two reference points located near each extremity of these sides, sometimes outside sometimes inside the hexagon. The system includes combinations allowing the traces-/forms to show themselves from time to time through differential replicas."
(Self-published publication of a possible text/manifesto Painting, March 1971)
The exhibition
The MAMCO decided to present this exhibition due to two important reasons: first the wish of the curator of the institution to showcase new works of the collection, but also due to the acquisition of one work of the artist in 2020 and the recent gift of two more works by the descendant of the artist.
The first room of the exhibition present the well-known works of the artist with its canvas made out of geometrics shapes and tree colours: blue, red and white. The second room is more experimental and it showcase a mix of different works showcasing his experimentations and his different style, from his "abstract expressionist" period to his sketches and drawings.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: MAMCO
Date: 22.2.2023 – 18.6.2023
Curators: Julien Fronsacq
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the MAMCO
10, Rue des Vieux Grenadiers
CH-1205 Genève
Phone: +41 22 320 61 22
Mail: info@mamco.ch