Sam Szafran : Obsessions D'un Peintre

Exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, 28 September 2022 - 16 January 2023

Sam Szafran (1934-2019) occupies a very special place in the history of art in the second half of the 20th century. He dedicated his work to a figurative and poetic/conic approach to reality that he developed far from the art world and its fads, in the seclusion of the studio. As a self-taught artist with an inexhaustible curiosity, he was introduced to pastel and then to watercolour, fields of artistic research that he has ardently pursued. Szafran tests the gaze by distorting and deconstructing perspective in enclosed spaces that are hermetically sealed in on themselves.

This catalogue of the first exhibition devoted to Szafran by a French museum in two decades highlights some of the artist's key subjects: workshops, staircases and foliage. Various essays reconsider the artist's body of work in order to open up new avenues, in particular on the links between Szafran's work and his time.