Salon du dessin 2024

In March 2024, Zeit Contemporary Art returned to the Salon du Dessin at the Palais Brongniart in Paris, a second appearance following its debut there the year before. That year's guests of honor, the Fondation Dubuffet and the Tavolozza Foundation, set a fitting backdrop for a booth built entirely around the vitality of drawing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Julio González anchored the presentation's case for drawing as a modern artistic medium in its own right. A wartime Paris drawing by Picasso captured the psychological compression of the reclining figure under pressure, while Miró's lyrical signs and González's explorations of volume and sculptural space pushed drawing well beyond the page. Andy Warhol's drawings from the 1950s, made before his public Pop persona took shape, added a private and emotionally direct note. Jean Dubuffet's ink and collage work went further still, into raw gesture and anti-academic freedom.

Elsewhere in the booth, drawing turned toward abstraction and the body. Sol LeWitt's gouaches transformed line into rhythm and conceptual structure. Stanley Whitney's monotype folded color and grid into a compact, musical register. Kiki Smith and Tom Wesselmann took up the body through vulnerability and graphic compression, and Nelo Vinuesa's recent works on paper closed the presentation on a note of color and emotional landscape. The two halves of the booth, read side by side, made the case for drawing as both a historical foundation and a living medium.