Alicia Penalba. La sculpture entre terre et ciel

Three years after the exhibition Chana Orloff. Sculpter l'époque, the Musée Zadkine invites visitors once again to (re)discover the work of an important 20th-century sculptor. Alicia Penalba (1913-1982), an artist of international renown, was born in Argentina but spent most of her career in France.

The Musée Zadkine, the first museum in France to devote an exhibition to her since her death, was the obvious place to pay tribute to the artist who began her career in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, in the sculpture class run by Zadkine.

Alternating chronological sections with thematic essays, the exhibition places Penalba's work within the artistic context of the 1950s and 1960s. It explores the connections she forged with other artists, Zadkine of course, but also Brancusi, Picasso and Matisse. It focuses on Penalba's totemic works, which combine monumentality and verticality and highlight the role of nature as a driving force of creation. Marked in childhood by the Argentine landscapes, Penalba indeed never ceased to draw on them to invent sculptures with biomorphic forms evoking desert plants. Alicia Penalba's interest in the decorative arts, and her determination to extend her sculpture across different media, ceramics and tapestry, and across different scales, from the monumental to the miniature and jewellery, is the other common thread of an exhibition that reveals an independent and talented creator who considerably renewed her art.