Exhibition guide

Discover this new exhibition in the hall of the Sainte-Geneviève library, which invites you to fully enter the engraved world of the Danish artist, at the heart of their visual language.

Visit details

  • Dates: From Wednesday, July 01, 2026 to Saturday, July 11, 2026: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 1:30 PM to 6:30 PM From Sunday, April 19, 2026 to Sunday, May 03, 2026: Sunday from 1:30 PM to 6:30 PM From Friday, April 17, 2026 to Tuesday, June 30, 2026: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 10:30 AM to 9:00 PM
  • Venue: Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 10, place du Panthéon, Paris
  • Price: free
  • Audience: All audiences
  • Source: Event page

About the exhibition

With the exhibition “The Engraver and the Spells”, the Sainte-Geneviève Library continues the dialogue initiated around the work of Lars Bo. Following “A Dane in Paris” (October 15 - December 17, 2025), the first exhibition dedicated to the artist's figure and his journey through documents from his family's archives, this second exhibition intends to offer a new perspective and a change of scale. It is no longer just a matter of exploring and shedding light on an itinerary, but of entering fully into the engraved universe of Lars Bo, at the heart of his visual language.

Born in Kolding in 1924 and settled in Paris after the Second World War, Lars Bo made engraving much more than a means of expression: as Charles Perusseaux points out, “for him, everything is centered on engraving, the work and the atmosphere of engraving”. It becomes a territory of experimentation, a space of metamorphosis where literature, dreams, and anxiety intersect. While his name remains closely associated with the illustration of great texts, from Andersen to Gogol, including Nerval and Kafka, his engraved work displays a quite personal power. Hybrid figures, unstable architectures, mental landscapes, and ambiguous creatures compose a universe created as if by enchantment, governed by uncertain laws and where the dreamlike, the strange, and the marvelous flirt with anxiety.

Presented here in large-scale formats, the engravings and drawings assert their visual strength and their ability to immerse the viewer in another reality. The latter is no longer facing the traces of illustration; they are more confronted with images that impose themselves on the gaze and captivate the imagination. “The Engraver and the Spells” thus invites a journey: that of a universe where the precision of the line serves a poetics of disturbance, and where Lars Bo, nicknamed “the magician”, acts as an alchemist of the image.

This exhibition is part of the continuity of a partnership based on the trust and generosity of Ludmilla Balfour‑Hess and Miranda Roux, Lars Bo's daughters, and Titania Hess, his granddaughter, whom we thank once again, and extends the Sainte-Geneviève Library's purpose of questioning European artistic circulations as well as visual forms born at the intersection of the book and artistic imaginaries.

With “The Engraver and the Spells”, Lars Bo appears less as the Danish artist settled in Paris glimpsed in the autumn of 2025 than as a creator of worlds as particular as they are coherent. This exhibition invites the public to let themselves be captivated by these works, to experience their narrative and symbolic power, and to measure how much the art of engraving can become, under an “enchanted hand” (to borrow the title of a short story by Gérard de Nerval illustrated by Lars Bo), an act of lasting fascination.

Free admission by reservation during the Sainte-Geneviève Library's opening hours.