Exhibition guide
unknown to the artist, loaded with a sensitive and intimate dimension.Galerie AB presents from May 28 to June 20 a set of gouaches, pastels and drawings by Martial Raysse. Through around forty recent works, the exhibition reveals a side
Visit details
- Dates: From Thursday May 28, 2026 to Saturday June 20, 2026:
- Venue: Galerie AB - Agnès Aittouares, 5 rue Jacques Callot, Paris
- Price: free
- Audience: All audiences
- Source: Event page
About the exhibition
At Martial Raysse, drawing is never secondary. It constitutes a mode of communication, a poetic writing that touches the intimate and the unconscious. Freed from any preparatory function, it becomes an autonomous space. Raysse develops a universe where mythology, carnival, the flood of the Old Testament and the image of women constitute a vocabulary that confronts us with the sources of our emotional charges: joy, fear, violence and love.
“When we enter Martial's work we do not come out unscathed, a transformation has taken place…”
If his first works participate in pop aesthetics and culture contemporary visual art, Martial Raysse began a decisive turning point in the 1970s. He turns away from consumerist imagery to reinvest the great tradition of Western painting. This return is neither nostalgic nor academic. On the contrary, it constitutes an attempt to reactivate, in a fully contemporary language, the fundamental questions that have run through the history of art since the Renaissance: the representation of the body, light, the sacred and the spiritual presence of the image.
Martial Raysse, Drawings: recent works - Galerie AB - work la Trop sage Sylviane; Credits: Galerie AB - Agnès Aittouares
The work of Martial Raysse revolves around the same ambition: to reappropriate history and mythology by integrating them