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Open: Tue-Sat 10.30am-6.30pm

16 Avenue Matignon, 75008, Paris, France
Open: Tue-Sat 10.30am-6.30pm

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“[…] what is fascinating and important is to take artists seriously, and taking them seriously means trying to understand what they are telling us, understand where they are coming from and analyze the ideas they are formulating to better grasp what they are transmitting to us in order to convince us of their vision of the world. If artists didn’t have something to tell us, they’d just stay home, they would keep quiet, they wouldn’t show us anything. So it is their message, their vision of the world that we need to address so that—in their very diversity—we can study the differences, the issues. […] It’s this representation of a changing world in a language that we thought was stable that has meaning. When you compare and show all the different reactions that affect a place within a fairly circumscribed period of time, […] it opens up a whole host of avenues, it allows you to ask original questions about artistic production.”
- Serge Guilbaut

“Once we have destroyed, cut up, deconstructed the real, we are left with a network of strong metal wires, a human construction full of power. And this is where we pick up the work. We take control of these wires and double them. Thus new figures are created, new realities are imagined. Imagination is liberated. On the horizon of being, freedom is superior, power approaches possibility. We can thus glimpse new subjectivities, new fields of action, new cooperative syntheses.”
- Toni Negri

Tornabuoni Art opens its doors to curator Marc Donnadieu, who turns his critical gaze on the gallery’s post-war masterpieces. In keeping with his experimental approach, he draws out a new thread, highlighting the generative power of the destructive actions to which artists subjected the work of art after the Second World War. Twenty-five works by twenty-two Italian and international artists are assembled in a trilingual alphabet, each letter the beginning of an iconoclastic verb: Enrico Baj ‘‘attacks’’, Alberto Burri ‘‘burns’’, while Arman ‘‘vandalizes’’ and Tancredi ‘‘zigzags’’.

Borrowing its title from Alighiero Boetti’s masterful and poetic disruption of letters and words, this exhibition entitled An alphabet of order and disorder adopts the principle of French, Italian and English primers to better qualify the acts of destruction/creation that are at the root of a transition between old orders that have become sterile and obsolete, and new disorders that are more fertile, fruitful and open to the world. Here, at Tornabuoni Art in Paris, these are revealed by twenty verbs of destruction/creation, associated with twenty-five exceptional works signed by twenty-two artists emblematic of the avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century.

Opening on April 24 – 24-4-2024 – this project, dedicated to the artist Alighiero Boetti, celebrates the 30th anniversary of his death in an ‘‘orderly and disorderly’’ fashion.