Paris Celebrates Barbara Chase-Riboud With Major Exhibition

For seven decades, Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1939), an American artist living in Paris, has created abstract art which conveys her singular perspective on memory, history, identity, and monumentality. This fall, eight Parisian museums are co-exhibiting Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré (Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released), a landmark exhibition of works by Barbara Chase-Riboud. The exhibition presents a series of monumental sculptures in bronze and silk as well as the artist’s poems and drawings that create a through line across the last 70 years that the artist has lived in Paris.

Each sculpture was paired with a specific institution, which allows the viewer to interpret the works in the context of Riboud’s life and practice in Paris. Two works from Riboud’s Cleopatra series are installed among the Louvre’s finest examples of Greek and Roman statuary in the Salle des Cariatides at the heart of the Museum. A third sculpture, Gold Column, is installed under the Pyramid. The show has already been critically acclaimed and fêted, including a review in the New York Times.  

In addition to the Musée du Louvre, the exhibition will be on view at the Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Musée Guimet, Musée du quai Branly, Palais de la Porte Dorée, Palais de Tokyo and Philharmonie de Paris. This exhibition is organized by Erin Jenoa Gibert and Donatien Grau and sponsored by the generous leadership of the Ford Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The exhibition will be on view through mid January.