Paul Gauguin, What! Are You Jealous?, 1892. Courtesy of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

PAUL GAUGUIN exhibition at Fondation Beyeler

“Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature‘s means.” Paul Gauguin. With Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), the Fondation Beyeler presents one of the most famous and fascinating artists in history. As one of the great European cultural highlights in the year 2015, the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler brings together about fifty masterpieces by Gauguin from leading international museums and private collections.

Paul Gauguin, Rupe Rupe, Fruit gathering, 1899. Courtesy of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Gauguin’s groundbreaking paintings have become icons of modern art and are some of the most significant and valuable cultural treasures in the world. With their luminous colours and elementary forms, they revolutionised art and they still entrance viewers today. While featuring Gauguin’s diverse self-portraits and his visionary, spiritual paintings from the time he spent in Brittany, the exhibition focuses on the world-famous paintings he created in Tahiti.

Paul Gauguin, Parau api, (What news?), 1892. Courtesy of Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden

In those depictions of sensual female figures set amidst idyllic landscapes and often accompanied by emblematic animals, the artist celebrates his ideal of an unspoilt exotic world. Gauguin’s masterpieces convey an exceptional harmony between nature and culture, mysticism and eroticism, dream and reality. In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes a selection of Gauguin’s outstanding sculptures that evoke the largely vanished art of the South Seas.

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897/98. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Tompkins Collection, Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund

Gauguin’s remarkable creations tell of his quest for a lost paradise on earth, of his turbulent history as an artist who moved between different cultures during a life marked by passion and adventure.

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