Berggruen Gallery | Drawing with Scissors: Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse’s Jazz | San Francisco
March 10 – April 23, 2022 [Extended]
Drawing with Scissors: Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse’s Jazz
Berggruen Gallery
In-Person Viewing:
10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105
Virtual Viewing:
https://www.berggruen.com/exhibitions/drawing-with-scissors
“By creating these colored, paper cut-outs, it seems to me that I am happily anticipating things to come. I don’t think that I have ever found such balance as I have in creating these paper cut-outs. But I know that it will only be much later that people will realize to what extent the work I am doing today is in step with the future.” — Henri Matisse, 1951
Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Drawing with Scissors: Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse’s Jazz, a group exhibition inspired by the monumental set of twenty pochoir prints by French artist Henri Matisse. Drawing with Scissors will be on view at Berggruen Gallery from March 10 through April 16, 2022. The exhibition features work by:
Polly Apfelbaum | John Baldessari | Bruce Cohen | Sarah Crowner | Richard Diebenkorn
Austin Eddy | Helen Frankenthaler | David Hockney | Ellsworth Kelly | Paul Kremer | Anna Kunz
JJ Manford | Henri Matisse | Beatriz Milhazes | Robert Motherwell | Kelly Ording | Muzae Sesay
Mickalene Thomas | Jonas Wood
Drawing with Scissors: Contemporary Works in Conversation with Matisse’s Jazz recognizes Matisse’s 1947 groundbreaking series Jazz and its formal and spirited connection to works by contemporary artists. During the post-war era, while battling personal illness, Matisse turned his isolation into creative liberation. While limited in mobility and struggling to paint and sculpt, he began exploring collage and the stencil process, pochoir. Using gouache, Matisse coated sheets of paper with paint, allowed them to dry for tactile texture, then cut and arranged the sheet into intricate shapes and forms. Matisse famously described this process as “drawing with scissors” linking “line with color, contour with the surface.” His chromatic collage series, Jazz, later made into a print series, is full of songful figuration, themes of performance, and a lively blend of hopefulness and unease. Through collage, Jazz combines a vibrant array of colors and forms and has been of great inspiration to contemporary artists. Jazz is a triumph of mixed media and artistic vitality and Drawing with Scissors celebrates its legacy and the continued discourse it elicits in the present day.
