Aurélie Nemours

Museum Haus Konstruktiv is devoting a solo exhibition to French artist Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005), which presents the various periods in the oeuvre of this grande dame of geometric abstract art, thanks to loaned works from Swiss private collections. In the very male-dominated domain of constructivist art, Aurélie Nemours, alongside Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, is one of the female artists who, according to art critic Michel Seuphor, had a determining influence on the development of abstract art in France. It was not until after first studying art history at École du Louvre that Nemours started to train as an artist: initially in Paul Colin’s studio, and later under André Lhote and Fernand Léger. She found a consistent geometric visual language in the 1950s and kept developing it further until her death in 2005.

26.10.2017.–14.1.2018
curated by Sabine Schaschl

Already in 1994, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, which was still called haus für konstruktive und konkrete kunst at the time, held the first Swiss museum exhibition on Aurélie Nemours. That presentation, curated by the artist herself, brought together works from constructivist beginnings through to the 1990s. The current exhibition shows a selection of Aurélie Nemours works from Swiss private collections. The significance of Nemours’s work within the international art scene was mainly recognized by collectors in Germany, the USA and Switzerland at first. Now, her oeuvre is represented in public and private collections worldwide and has been honored in numerous solo and group exhibitions. The selection of works in our exhibition extends from the 1950 piece Sur le cercle, which was inspired by Auguste Herbin and already shown in the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1953 at Galerie Colette Allendy, through to the Structure du Silence series, produced in the 1990s.

The independence, concentration and radicality that Nemours demonstrated in her work as a visual artist also featured in her lyrical work. In 1954, she wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles:

Dans mon sablier
Contre toute apparence
Le vide monte lentement
Et prend la place du sable

In my hourglass
Despite all appearances
The void slowly rises
And takes the place of the sand

This literary image accurately describes Nemours’s artistic research: extreme simplification is the result of a very long period of research, involving intuition and immersion. Reduction to the essentials and concentration on the absolute (color in unison and harmony, form in rhythm and pattern) were the important themes, to which Aurélie Nemours devoted herself. Her works are part of a comprehensive regime that had a mathematical basis, but was never applied in a solely mathematical and rational manner. Thus, the oeuvre of Aurélie Nemours, which can be classified as concrete art, clearly differs from works by Zurich Concretists Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, who were about her age. The starting point for her geometric compositions, much like those of Piet Mondrian, was more artistic intuition than a strictly calculated system. The fact that her fine sense of form, color and rhythm could nevertheless be linked to logical design principles is demonstrated, in particular, by the serial works that Nemours developed to an increasing extent in the 1970s. One of her most famous series, for instance, is the body of works entitled Rythme du millimètre, which she spent over a decade developing. Examples from this series are on display at Museum Haus Konstruktiv. Due to her reduced vocabulary, consisting of horizontal, vertical, rectangle, square and line, Nemours’s oeuvre gives off a sense of timeless clarity and, as a result of how she handled this vocabulary, it possesses lightness, musicality and elegance.