• Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, Untitled, 1959, Oil on cardboard

  • CONFERENCE : "PEGEEN : A SINGULAR VOICE WITHIN THE AVANT-GARDES"

    by Gaia Finotello

    Through a sensitive and in-depth reading of the work of Pegeen, born Pegeen Vail and daughter of Peggy Guggenheim, this conference aims to rediscover an artist with a profoundly original pictorial language. Situated within the environment of the twentieth-century avant-gardes — between Surrealism, modern art, and international artistic networks — Pegeen created a suspended universe populated by enigmatic figures, richly ornamented settings, and human relationships marked by absence and interiority. Through vivid colors and scenes of apparent naivety emerges a reflection on solitude, motherhood, femininity, and artistic creation as a space of self-determination.

     

    DURAZZO
    23, rue du Cirque 75008 Paris
    30th May at 3 PM
  • GAIA FINOTELLO

    GAIA FINOTELLO

    Gaia Finotello is currently completing a Master’s degree (Master 2 Research) in Contemporary Art History at Sorbonne Université. Originally from Venice, she worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection as well as at the Venice Art Biennale before dedicating her research thesis to the painter Pegeen. More broadly, her work seeks to rethink art history through singular artistic trajectories shaped by their time while affirming a distinctive voice of their own.

  • SPRING SHOW : PEGEEN VAIL GUGGENHEIM, IN THE CONTEXT OF THE AVANT-GARDE

    Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, Untitled, c.1940, Pencil on paper

  • 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

  • Hilla Rebay, Attraction, c. 1948, Oil on canvas