The Gallery, to which the current exhibit at the Musée Granet of Aix-en-Provence Passion de l’Art, Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger depuis 1925 is dedicated, is proud to be presenting Whispers from the Earth.

The title evokes the work I Whispered to the Earth by contemporary Indian artist Zarina, on display in the exhibition – when paper becomes earth, a work- prayer in homage to a departed intimate. Zarina’s works are regularly displayed in international institutions such as the MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum. Massimiliano Gioni, director of the New Museum, has recently chosen her to participate in La Terra Inquieta at the Milano Triennale with the support of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation.

The exhibition brings together modern and contemporary artists whom the gallery has supported from its inception to today around the theme of Earth. It also echoes the numerous offsite exhibitions in French or international institutions in which the gallery is involved through the lending of works from its collection.

In the display window is Desert Heart Attack by Portuguese artist Rui Moreira, who draws uninterruptedly after returning from trips, doing a sort of mnemonic exercise by reliving the natural cycle of each space so as to feel all its nuances. Sweltering desert heat, intense sunlight, freezing temperatures in the mountains where the Ganges River has its source, extreme humidity of the Amazonian jungle… In 2016 a large solo exhibit, Os Piromanos, was dedicated to his work in Portugal (José de Guimarães International Centre for the Arts).

The exhibition opens with two artists closely linked to the story of the gallery, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes, whose works L’écho antérieur and En contrebas echo each other and whisper their part of truth. Starting on September 28, 2017, the joint Foundation of these two artists in Lisbon is organizing a major exhibition on prints of the gallery from 1925 to today. This provides a good opportunity to rediscover the ceiling of the Church Santa-Isabel in Lisbon by the artist Michael Biberstein: one of Biberstein’s “dream surfaces” is presented in the gallery, and echoes the sculpture floating in space by Japanese artist Susumu Shingu, sculptor of wind and nature, whose artistic projects have travelled throughout the world.

In dialogue with Masson’s La cour de ferme II, dated from 1930, Paul Rebeyrolle’s Anosisoa, l’île du bien, a work whose sensual lyricism takes the shape of a communion with nature, confronts the delicate sculpture Divisible by Paul Wallach, currently on display at the Bastian Gallery in Berlin, and Mark Tobey’s Monotype, which was celebrated this summer at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice with the exhibition Threading Light. Jeanne Bucher discovered the American artist during her second trip to New York in 1946 and Jean-François Jaeger exhibited his work for the first time in Europe a decade later. Jeanne Bucher also came back from the United States with works from Robert Motherwell that are presented here in an echo of Paul Klee’s Arbres parmi les pierres. The gallery is currently lending a work from the artist to the exhibition 10 Americans After Paul Klee (Sept 15, 2017-January 7, 2018) at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland.

Discovered in 1989 during the exhibition Les magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou (curated by Jean- Hubert Martin), and taken on since by the gallery, Chinese artist Yang Jiechang celebrated his 60th birthday in 2016 at the gallery, during a retrospective exhibition Sur la Terre Comme au Ciel. A monograph on the artist, I Often Do Bad Things, was also published on that occasion. His work Drifting Metropolis, with its mineral ink and colors, is put in perspective with the immobile, alert and silent deer from Portuguese artist Miguel Branco. The sculpture was displayed, in a monumental format, in the courtyard of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature during the exhibition that the Museum dedicated to his work in 2015/2016, Black Deer.