The Musée Marmottan Monet is inviting Carole Benzaken to take part in the 8th edition of its “unexpected dialogues”. For the first time, to mark its 90th anniversary, the museum is inviting the artist to occupy several of its spaces. Presented from 17 October 2024 to 16 February 2025, the exhibition ‘Morceaux choisis’ brings together a group of works by the artist, most of them previously unseen, which resonate with paintings from Claude Monet’s last period, the Empire collection and the museum’s collections of art from the Middle Ages.

Welcoming encounters (spaces for unexpected dialogue)

Carole Benzaken has been familiar with the Musée Marmottan Monet since she was a teenager, and her relationship with the institution is one she describes as ‘Proustian reminiscence’. The Water Lilies, the ultimate work by Claude Monet (1840-1926), were the catalyst for many of her visits. The eclecticism of the collections, made up of numerous gifts and bequests, and the fact that they live together in a former home belonging to collectors Jules and Paul Marmottan, is what stands out.

The intimate, erudite atmosphere of the museum led her intuitively to create a set-up reminiscent of a private home library. Developed in the contemporary space of the dialogues, it functions as an extension, in the basement, of the former domestic spaces of the private mansion. A ‘new living room’ that she materialises by combining schematic book motifs with pencil-effect monochromes on the walls of the room. This original project, printed on wallpaper by Isidore Leroy, features a series of recent paintings, most of them specially produced for the exhibition. Their large-format surfaces are made up of abstract or figurative fragments, arranged together in formal and chromatic combinations. The combination of printed murals and canvases, in a kind of illusionistic blurring, produces an optical explosion of space. The notions of shimmer, environment and fluidity subtly echo the latest pictorial research by the master of Giverny, as well as Joan Mitchell, whose work (pastel and oil technique) Carole Benzaken is presenting, done four-handed with the artist in 1992.

This device is home to a multiple and delightful way of thinking, made up of cross-references, narratives and places that Carole Benzaken likes to unfold. At the centre of this dialogue is her sculpture ‘Conversations’, which is both original and unexpected. She deconstructs two Empire-style chairs by Jacob-Desmalter. The variously patterned backrests are folded like book covers, multiplied into different disjointed facets, and rest on sloping seats with excess legs. ‘Conversations ‘ is a place for all kinds of exchanges, all kinds of words, from the most trivial to the most secret, past and future. It pays tribute to the human dimension of the museum and to Paul Marmottan’s library in Boulogne-Billancourt.

Benzaken / Verbruggen: The tulip as motif (museum hall – Great Staircase)

In 1990, Carole Benzaken began her Tulip series, to which the Fondation Cartier devoted an exhibition in 1994. This motif, taken from horticultural catalogues or personal photographs, is repeated on canvas, head-on, in the form of close-ups, and arranged in different sequences in large compositions. More than an attempt to exhaust the subject, the principle of seriality that she imposes on herself responds to a desire to overflow the image and its potential futures.

Presented in the museum’s main staircase, leading to the first floor, Marylin enters into a dialogue with Nature Morte aux fleurs by Verbruggen Le Jeune (1664-1730), a floral composition with tulips. The classical style of the Flemish still-life painter contrasts with Carole Benzaken’s gestural brushstrokes and lush chromaticism, which gradually lead the viewer towards an expressive abstraction that goes beyond the figurative. The work both distances itself from its subject and emphasises the persistence of the codified motif of the flower in the history of art.

Unwinding time: The Painted Scroll ( Illuminations room)

In 1989, Carole Benzaken began her Rouleau à peintures, a constantly evolving work that she intends, in her own words, ‘to continue to the infinity of its possible length, in the time it is given’. On this scroll (5.5 cm x 104 metres to date), she transposes extracts from her personal archive of photographs, screen captures and newspaper and magazine clippings. Each image is painted with the care of a traditional miniature painting. The framing and editing induced by the juxtaposition of these paintings are reminiscent of the 35mm film format. The eye moves through an uninterrupted flow of fragments of reality. Over time, the Paint Roller has become a pictorial memory and a personal diary, revealing the artist’s interests and the evolution of his style.

Curators: Sylvie Carlier, director of collections at the Musée Marmottan Monet, and Anne-Sophie Luyton, curatorial assistant at the Musée Marmottan Monet.