On the occasion of its new exhibition, the Galerie de la Béraudière places sculpture in the spotlight through a selection of modern and contemporary works. The exhibition brings together three artists whose approaches are profoundly different yet complementary: Germaine Richier, Antoine Poncet, and Vladimir Zbynovsky.
A major figure in twentieth-century sculpture and a central artist for the gallery, Germaine Richier embodies a radical and deeply human vision of form. Marked by the upheavals of the post-war period, her work breaks with all idealization to explore fragility, tension, and existential anxiety. Through powerful, often hybrid figures, she redefined figurative sculpture and asserted a modernity whose force remains undiminished.
In a decidedly different register, the exhibition highlights the work of Antoine Poncet, a key figure in post-war abstraction. Born in Paris in 1928 and trained in Switzerland and Paris under Germaine Richier, Casimir Reymond, and Ossip Zadkine, he fully embraced abstraction in the early 1950s, notably through his contact with Jean Arp. Working in bronze and marble with exceptional rigor, Poncet developed a vocabulary of sensual, balanced, and open forms that invite both a physical and contemplative experience.
Contemporary creation is represented by Vladimir Zbynovsky, whose work the gallery has followed for several years. Combining optical glass and stone, his sculpture explores with both rigor and poetry the tension between fullness and void, balance and imbalance, transparency and opacity. His distinctive sculptural language extends and reinterprets the formal questions raised by modernism, situating his work within a living continuity.
By bringing these three artists together, the exhibition offers a journey through different conceptions of sculpture, from the post-war period to the present day. It highlights the enduring nature of certain fundamental questions — form, material, presence — while revealing the diversity of plastic responses proposed by each generation.