Sur le vif and previously.
Pierre Buraglio, works on paper
(1960-2025)

From 26 Apr
To 21 Sep 2025

AT MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS

The Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans presents the first retrospective devoted to Pierre Buraglio's work on paper. Invited to make the museum's graphic arts cabinets his own, to mingle his old works with drawings made in situ, and to create a dialogue between his work and the permanent collections, Pierre Buraglio unveils an original itinerary that questions both the practice and the very nature of drawing through its most varied expressions.

Pierre Buraglio has been active on the French art scene for over sixty years, and was one of the driving forces behind abstraction, inventing a brushless style of painting based on the assembly or detour of composite or manufactured materials. Although his creative approach assimilates him to the Supports/Surfaces movement, formed in the late 1960s by former students of the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Vincent Bioulès, Claude Viallat, François Rouan, Jean-Pierre Pincemin...), the artist has never adopted a pre-established system or method, letting himself be guided solely by his intuition. Although drawing has always played an essential role in Pierre Buraglio's research, this aspect of his work had never been the subject of a separate exhibition.

His now "classic" Dessins d'après... series, produced in graphite pencil or Indian ink since the 1970s, coexist with other, more abstract works or those using other techniques, underlining his incessant inventiveness. Masking, stapling, cutting, collage and assemblage all test his unwavering desire for renewal.

The retrospective Sur le vif, et précédemment , part of the museum's permanent collection, presents the artist's work on paper in all its diversity. The uniqueness and originality of his work lies in a willingness to deconstruct the approach usually accepted as conventional, the better to reconstruct it, or rather to acknowledge the coexistence of a priori contradictory approaches. It is this richness that the exhibition brings to light, showing the multiplicity of a thought process in constant search, from the artist's beginnings to the present day.