Gaston-Louis ROUX and avant-gardism

From June 8th to October 29th

Gaston-Louis Roux (Provins, 1904 – Paris, 1988)
From 1927 to 1956, for almost 30 years, Roux was part of the Kahnweiler group of artists (along with Picasso, Gris, Braque,
Léger, Laurens, Togores, Masson and Manolo Hugué). Kahnweiler was the most famous art dealer of the century and a great promoter of the Cubist movement and avant-garde art.
In 1929, at the age of 25, Roux had his first individual exhibition at the Galerie Simon.
Roux participated in many international exhibitions with the group of surrealists. His paintings are surprising due to their
colours and the rotundity of his compositions. They combine geometric and biomorphic shapes and create a surrealism very
close to artists such as Pablo Picasso, André Masson and Max Ernst. He also participated in many publications, such as the
second cover of the magazine Minotaure.
He took part in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, where the reflections of Leiris and his observation of Ethiopian painting led him to give up abstraction on returning to Paris. In 1956 he stopped exhibiting with Kahnweiler; his realist paintings were top quality but were not what the art dealer was interested in.
He was a friend of Alberto Giacometti, Michel Leiris, André Masson and Roger Vitrac, who frequently wrote about Roux and his work.
The works from his first period, owned by Kahnweiler, were stored in a deposit in Paris without being exhibited. In December 2001, they saw the light of day after almost 50 years, at an exhibition in the Galeria Joan Gaspar in Barcelona, which was followed by others, in Barcelona as well as Madrid.
The “Gaston-Louis Roux and avant-gardism” exhibition, put on by the Tobacco Museum, is a stroll through 40 works by this forgotten artist, and offers you the chance to discover 20th-century artistic avant-gardism.

 

Gaston-Louis ROUX and avant-gardism