Des(T/s)in(s) de guerre

October 2016

Images of broken bodies and ruined lives, of space which shifts and deconstructs, the drawings and engravings produced by Zadkine during the First World War are uncompromising. These sixty or so compositions marked by the elliptic seriality of fallen bodies have never been assembled together until now.

They will be on October 2016, in the studios into which Zadkine, who enlisted voluntarily in 1915, was gassed in 1916, and finally decommissioned in 1917, moved in 1928. Alongside these drawings of the war: the work of Chris Marker: Owls at noon, Prelude: The Hollow Men, inspired by the poem the Hollow Men written by T.S. Eliot in 1925. Fragments of the poem by the American writer, wild-eyed photographs of wounded soldiers and images of women beautiful enough to bring tears to your eyes follow in serial succession on eight screens, in a scripted style which overturns narrative conventions. An echo chamber for the duration of an exhibition, shards of war on paper left by someone who was one of those who returned  – like Apollinaire, with his bandaged head and Cendrars, who lost an arm. Whose destiny was to return.

Press area