Exhibition Marianne Bourges'paintings

Lalevade-d'Ardèche, Ardèche

Opening : Saturday 26 September 2026.

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Through portraits, landscapes and still lifes, on the most unexpected media, in formats and perspectives ranging from atomic structure to the earth-scale dimension of the landscape, she employs a wide variety of techniques.

“My painting is figurative; it is my technique that is abstract.”
Like Cézanne – whose studio she curated for 30 years – Marianne Bourges scrutinised reality throughout her life.
Although her artistic work—which she defined as the result of specific moments of intimate dialogue with reality—was not intended to create works of art, what she calls her ‘traces’ are indeed just that.
The modernity of her perspective on timeless subjects is what gives her work its strength. The sharpness of her eye is such, and provides her hand with such rich material, that it has complete freedom to convey the sensation.
Fascinated by quantum physics, layered space, fractals, and so on, she finds a poetic equivalent to these scientific theories, without really understanding them but through the poetic intuition that observation affords her.
With the exception of a few exhibitions in her early years – when she was a student of Bachelard and associated with Sartre and Beckett, amongst others – she refused to show her work, believing that the intervention and comments of an audience could do nothing
Today, the discovery of a surprising, rich and abundant body of work is arousing keen interest, whilst very few were privileged enough to know of its existence.

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