Poirier En Suspension Palais d'Iena

Designed by architect August Perret in 1939, the Palais d’Iéna which houses the French Economic Environmental Council is an outstanding architectural marvel and also a space that is particularly adapted to three dimensional art.

During the 2018 FIAC in Paris, a year before Giuseppe Penone’s Matrice di Linfa, the Palais d’Iéna hosted « Suspension » an exhibition curated by Mathieu Poirier compiling a history of hanging sculptures from 1918 to 2018. Marcel Duchamp was one of the first to to experiment with gravity with his 1918 sculpture de voyage (sculpture for traveling) and soon paved the way for “Mobile” art which really took off in the 1950’s, in the early days of space exploration with artists Soto, Daniel Buren, Julio Le Parc, Sol LeWitt or Robert Morris.

Yves Klein’s relief planétaire bleu sans titre (RP 23) 1961

Penone at the Palais d’Iéna

In 2013, Giuseppe Penone’s powerful tree sculptures placed on the Royal Way’s immaculate cut grass had created a sensation in Versailles by contrasting with André le Nôtre’s controlled landscaped gardens designed more than 400 years ago.

Penone’s collaboration with Versailles commenced in 1999 when he was able to buy two dead cedar tree trunks from the remains of a thunderstorm. Cedro di Versailles and Tea scorza e scorza (Between Bark and Bark) were made from those tree trunks and highlight the artist’s intention not to shape nature and alienate it from man but rather to show how man and nature bear resemblance to one another. 

In 2019 Penone later occupied the hypostyle hall of the Palais Iena which houses the French Economic Environmental Council with his monumental installation Matrice di linfa, a large scale tree sculpture cut open like sacrificial altar.

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A hidden gem in the Royal Stables of Versailles

Away from the public eye, only a few feet away from the Château of Versailles securely stored inside the Royal Stables, lies an unsuspected treasure: the Louvre Museum’s unbelievable gallery of plaster casts of the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquites. 

The mouldings of the Winged Victory of Samothrace with and without her wings, the nymphs of Girardon, the metopes of the Parthenon and even the colonnades of the Temple of Castor and Pollux can quietly be observed inside the stone vaulted high-ceilinged wings of the Small Stable built between 1679 and 1682 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. 

Formerly stored in the Louvre Museum, the casts landed in Versailles in 1970 after the events of May 1968 when protesters managed to destroy half the plaster collection considering it a symbol of academicism and artistic rigour. Between 1970 and 1978 more than a hundred casts were reassembled but then left untouched until 1999, when the Louvre’s Department of Greek, Etuscan and Roman Antiquities launched the initiative to restore the entire collection. The gypsothèque in Versailles finally opened in 2014 after multiple restorations and a minute research work regarding the mouldings origin.

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