Duval, Maïté Netherlands

Special exhibition 'Ainsi-soit elle'

Sculpture garden Gerolstein exhibits up until October 1st the sculptures of the French-Dutch artist Maïté Duval. The large bronze women figures, intimate double portraits and studies are being exhibited for the first time since Maïté's passing away, on last November 2nd.

Maïté Duval (Renazé, 1944 - Zutphen, 2019) gained wide fame with a fully own oeuvre of robust form, movement and femininity. Her figurative sculptures can be found in publicly posessed art collections, is loved by collectors and are part of many museum collections. Ainsi Soit-elle (1992), which can now be seen in Gerolstein as well, is characteristic for her art: clear and warm forms, volumes of rest and serenity and yet at the same time a bronze skin in which an intense tension is held. This is a world filled with worldly femininity, full of beauty in an ordinary day to day manner - and therefore so special.

The title of the sculpture, Zoals zij is (Eng: As she is), is also the title of this postume honouring. Skulpturengarten Gerolstein exhibits with pride twelve large and fifteen smaller sculptures of this charming, but o so strong French-Dutch artist. As she was: in a continuous searching between self conscious female figures full of lust for life at the one hand, and reserved, almost fragile nudes and (double)portraits on the other.

Two wonderful examples of Maïté's vigorous work can be admired in the garden. In De Sprong (1987) (Eng: The jump) the roughly shaped chest, male stomach and the muscular upper legs lead to an explosion of dance and movement. The large size and the energy seem to sometimes lift her sculptures above life itself. Volupté (1999) is a true ode to vigorous femininity: an enormous, extatic goddess.

Arcade (2001), the first sculpture Maïté made after the death of her husband in 1999, marks the other side of her work. The sculpture bends, reaches, longs... The title refers not only to the bent pose of the body; it is like Maïté herself tried to build a bridge to her deceased partner. A distressing en daring work. The sculpture and double portraits which followed are melancholic and refer to motherhood, love and intimicy. Malade d'amour (2002), Verdriet (2007) and Aime-moi (2008) are moving witnesses of an all-consuming love.
br > In her last years Maïté returned to the liveliness of her earliers female figures, but more reserved, ripened. She experimented with abstraction and changing the patine of the bronze. Feu de Lune, in fact just the lower part of the body, brings with its playful title and pure, almost abstract form a multitude of associations with it: a matriarch, a standard woman, a playful lover, an artist who kept renewing herself.

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