The legendary artist of the Várfok Gallery’s artist circle, Françoise Gilot (b.1921, Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France), celebrates her 100th birthday this year. The Várfok Gallery will pay tribute to the artist with a large-scale, retrospective exhibition, opening on Gilot’s 100th birthday, 26th. November, 2021.
The exhibition, showing works from all periods of the artist’s career in celebration of decades of tireless talent, will include outstanding paintings from private collections, monumental floating canvases, as well as works on view for the first time in Hungary – all securing Françoise Gilot’s place in art history, further demonstrated by the fact that her works are held in renowned public collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Françoise Gilot’s painterly career, spanning almost 80 years, is a story of triumph, her oeuvre gradually taking its rightful place over the last decades. She has fought many battles to shed the title of “Picasso’s muse” and to be recognised by the profession as a first-rate artist in her own right. Her art traces its roots back to the revolutionary heyday of the twentieth century where she was in direct contact with such notable personalities of the time as Braque, Matisse, Juan Gris, Paul Éluard, André Breton, Aragon, Cocteau and Robert Capa. The exhibition will also exhibit Capa’s famed image of Gilot and Picasso taken in 1948.
Since 2000, the Várfok Gallery has staged several solo exhibitions of Gilot’s unparalleled œuvre and it is proud to be the only European gallery to maintain a personal relationship with the artist and to show the largest collection of her work available in Europe.
Endre Rozsda, the Hungarian-born surrealist painter, is to be thanked for Gilot’s joining the Várfok Gallery’s artistic circle. The Várfok Project Room will commemorate this legendary artistic relationship with the exhibition titled, ‘I’m Dreaming about Françoise: The Friendship of Françoise Gilot and Endre Rozsda’. Telling a story through photographs, paintings and drawings, the exhibition will hope to recreate the sophisticated language that Gilot and Rozsda spoke to each other – the most beautiful expressions of mutual understanding in painting, the eternal imprints of a lifelong friendship.
Françoise Gilot is the last eyewitness to the art of the last century. The exhibition honoring her at the Várfok Gallery is a journey back in time seen through her person and her painting.
The exhibition is open from 27th. November, 2021 to 15th. January, 2022, between 11.00 and 18.00 from Tuesday to Saturday.
VÁRFOK GALLERY
1012 Budapest, Várfok u. 11.