Gérard Garouste Retrospective at Centre Pompidou Explores Torment and Literature

A major retrospective of French painter Gérard Garouste (born 1946, Paris) is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until January 2, 2023. The exhibition spans his entire career, featuring 120 works including large-format paintings, installations, sculptures, and graphic works arranged chronologically across eighteen rooms from 1969 to the present. Garouste, who has bipolar disorder and was hospitalized twice, creates art that blurs the line between sensation and perception, often depicting the artist as a clinical case and artworks as the illness. His paintings reference literary works such as Dante's Divine Comedy, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Hebrew scriptures, Kafka, Goethe, and La Fontaine. The exhibition highlights his engagement with Jewish texts like the Talmud, Midrash, and Megillah, which inspired series such as Indiennes and paintings on Judah and Tamar. In the late 2000s, he explored Goethe's Faust, drawing parallels between Wagner's Homunculus and the Golem of the Maharal of Prague. His latest series, Correspondances, focuses on Kafka and was developed with philosopher and rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin. The show also addresses themes of Classicism versus the 'Indian' as opposing entities, a peaceful relationship with religion contrasted with a violent conflict with his father, and his love for literature.