The Spring Show is a statement of intent, bringing together the artists who now shape the gallery’s programme: artists who chose divergence as a form of truth.
At the centre of this ensemble, two works by Pegeen Guggenheim, loaned by the family for the occasion, set the tone of the exhibition. The daughter of Peggy Guggenheim and Laurence Vail, Pegeen, grew up at the very heart of modern art history, surrounded by artists, collectors and writers, many of them exiles carrying both a profound sense of nostalgia and the formidable energy that would shape the post-war world.
Yet what is most striking in her painting is precisely that she is never overwhelmed by this inheritance. Exhibited at the age of thirteen, and praised even earlier, Pegeen transformed childhood into a meme theatre where apparent naivety always seems to conceal a deeper understanding. In turn, her adult life appears in her work through a childlike vision that is in turn tender, lucid and disquieting. Her seemingly simple figures and vivid colours carry something profoundly modern within them.
This Spring Show thus reveals the soul of the gallery: artists who lived the avant-garde not as a school, but as a necessity. Their works do not seek to illustrate the world, but to open doors onto other realities.
- Raphael Durazzo
