“Dear Melpomène,
We address you, muse of tragedy, once enthroned at the back of the Palais des Beaux-arts. From a plaster statue several meters high, you have become a ruin. From your dust particles, we wanted to go beyond the archetypal muse to form a living breath capable of infiltrating the interstices of established norms. Between inhalation and exhalation, between what is said and what is left unsaid, this breath embodies our deepest desires for social justice.”

Chère Melpomène is a call for change, for thwarting classic myths to pass on other stories closer to our everyday lives. The exhibition invites us to listen, feel and breathe together, in a poetic exploration of what connects us.
that connects us.

A journey through our intimate tragedies and the stories we can tell of them, the exhibition is an incantation to bring about spiritual and political alliances, to “magize” our struggles, to develop our imagination, to sustain hope. The works presented embody the will to resist and to build solidarity, and share speculative cosmogonies capable of translating the plurality of memories shaping our contemporary society, and cultivating our interdependence while respecting each other's differences.

Chère Melpomène interweaves some one hundred works from the collections, from students and studio heads, and from international artists, presenting a transhuman display.
artists, presenting a transhistorical display from the late 17th century to the present day. Most of the works have never been exhibited before - either recently acquired by the École or produced especially for the show - while others have not yet been circulated in the institutional milieu.

Nocturnes on Wednesday evenings : detailed program to follow.

Curators : Mélanie Bouteloup and Armelle Pradalier, co-directors of the “Artists & Exhibition Professions” program, Giulia Longo, Curator of Prints and Photographs at Beaux-Arts de Paris, with students in the program : Kenza Agbo, Adèle Anstett, Martin Bas, Héloïse Bayard, Léonard Berthou, Pauline Boudaoud, Mathilde Cassan, Mathilde Chabaud, Elisa Leïla Durand, Éloïse Frye De Lassalle, Klara Jakes, Clément Justin Hannin, Zoé Le Bacquer, Shumeng Li, Zahra Mansoor, Timothée Perron, Zoé Siau, Kit Szasz, Lara Ulusoy.

Artists : Soraya Abdelhouaret, Océane-Maria Adjovi, Giovanni Altieri, Shelim Alvarado, Dyan Daniel Assogo, Eugène Atget, Gianfranco Baruchello, Baya, Romain Bernini, Pierre-Amédée-Marcel Béronneau, Michel Blazy, Félix Bonfils Et Atelier, Rosa Bonheur, Wanda Elisabeth Bouleau-Rabaud, Jean Bhownagary, Luciano Castelli, Norbert Chautard, Arthur Coquille Hopfner, Henri Cueco, Storm De Hirsch, Princesse Diakumpuna, Amahiguere Dolo, Azzeazy, Guillaume Benjamin Amant Duchenne De Boulogne, Aysha E Arar, Mimosa Echard, Laura Esparch, Frederik Exner, Nina Fiorentini, Diego Garcia Lara, Guillaume-Sulpice Dit Paul Gavarni, Clémence Gbonon, Fengyi Guo, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Roger Hardy, Suzanne Husky, Fanny Irina, Svay Ken, Käthe Kollwitz, Shengqi Kong, Adrien Lagrange, Emmanuelle Lainé, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Gherasim Luca, Frédérique Loutz, Rose Lowder, Antoinette Lubaki, Turiya Magadlela, Joshua Merchan Rodriguez, Pierre Molinier, Céleste Moneger, Zora Neale Hurston, Aryle Nsengiyumva, Christel Pereira, Lizelor Perez, Enzo Perrier, Romain Pommelet, Jonathan Potana, Pierre Petit, Chloé Quenum, Axel Ramat, Lou Rappeneau, Akshay Rathore, Man Ray, Odilon Redon, Paul Richer, Sofia Salazar Rosales, Juliana Seraphim, Seumboy, Marcel Storr, Shooshie Sulaiman, Eden Tinto Collins, Marion Verboom, François Verdier, Yizhi Wan, Isabelle Waternaux, Yue Yu, Anna Zemankova and anonymous.

Practical informations

Wednesday April 09 - Sunday June 01 2025
Palais des Beaux-Arts
Beaux-Arts de Paris, 13 quai Malaquais, Paris 6e
Wednesday to Sunday, 1pm-7pm
2€, 5€ or 10€ it's up to you!

Petit Pierre, Statue de la Melpomène Papier albuminé, 26 x 19 cm © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Grand Palais RMN / Thierry Ollivier

Céleste Moneger, Toujours pas New-York Vidéo, capture d'écran

Akshay Rathore, White thing creeping in black 02, 2022 Feutre et aérosol sur carton, 78 x 97 cm

Odilon Redon, Le Buddha, 1895 Lithographie sur chine appliqué, 60 x 42,5 cm © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Grand Palais RMN / Thierry Ollivier

Henri Cueco, Autoportrait aux feuilles de pissenlit, 2002 Acrylique sur toile, 55,3 x 46,5 cm

Chloé Quenum, 19 juillet 2019, 2022 Courtesy of the artist and galleria Martina Simeti, Milan © Aurélien Mole

Romain Pommelet, En marche, 2023, chaussures, équerre en métal, simili-cuir, mousse, serre-joints, contreplaqué, dimensions variables

Jonathan Potana, Mouvement Primaire, Centre d'Art Ygrec - ENSAPC, 2024 Caméléon dans le formole suspendu avec fil de cuivre sur vélo et pierres, 5 x 1,3 m © Objet Pointus

Océane Maria Adjovi, L'origine de nos actes, 2024 Huile sur toile, 162 x 130 c

L'art et la vie et inversement presents the 26 artists who received the Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastiques from Beaux-Arts de Paris with the Congratulations of the Jury in 2024.

Their works present a wide diversity of subjects, materials and intentions. The challenge of showing them together is to question what they express about a generation, and what they say about today's world.

What emerges from these works is the students' desire and way of constantly blending art and life. Their lives appear in their works in iconographic, thematic and narrative forms, and their works integrate their lifestyles. Through them, we see the fragility of the world and the threat it faces. There's nothing new in taking close friends and family members as models, but this approach has another meaning here: L'art et la vie et inversement reveals a flexible, fluid world in which reversals are possible, where landscapes speak of inner worlds, and intimate monologues speak of the world as it is.

These are horizons inspired by childhood visions, inhabited by singular forms of spirituality, or marked by the tragedies of history. Bodies are put to the test in pain, indeterminacy, hallucination, tenderness or malice. Gleaners in the city or in nature, these artists often appear inclined to help each other and to dialogue between the arts. Landscapes, and the human and non-human beings who populate them, are sometimes themselves the actors in a film. Characters emerge from another film to enter life. Other works deliver more domestic, intimate visions. For them, gentleness is sometimes a way of tackling the toughest subjects. A vision of a world in transformation, of an enigmatic present, these positions are based on the complexity of human beings. What emerges is a shared humanity, efforts to hold on to worlds on the verge of disappearing, narratives sometimes beyond the realms of reality.

Curator : Anaël Pigeat

2024 Félicités : Gilad ASHERY, Örs BATMAZ, Abdelhak BENALLOU, Margot BERNARD, Zoé BERNARDI, Thomas BUSWELL, Anna DE CASTRO BARBOSA, Alessandro DI LORENZO, Hugo FRANCONERI, Clémence GBONON, Claire GITTON, Julien HEINTZ, Hélène JANICOT, Ruoxi JIN, Bahar KOCABEY, Joshua MERCHAN RODRIGUEZ, Alexandre NITZSCHE CYSNE, Sergiy PETLYUK, Hajar SATARI, Anne SIMIN SHITRIT, Isadora SOARES BELLETTI, Hugo VIANA DA SILVA, Leïla VILMOUTH, Louise VO TAN, Libo WEI, Alexandre YANG

Practical informations

Wednesday, February 12, 2025 to Sunday, March 16, 2025
Wednesday to Sunday, 1pm-7pm, Wednesday night until 9pm
Palais des Beaux-Arts
13 quai Malaquais, 75006 Paris

Responsible ticketing €2, €5 or €10, it's up to you!

Practical informations

This exhibition, dear to Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he had been teaching since 2015, presents to the public for the first time a substantial body of some fifty drawings, produced between 2006 and 2021.

Practical information

L'art et la vie et inversement presents the 26 artists who received the Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastiques from Beaux-Arts de Paris with the Congratulations of the Jury in 2024.

Practical informations

An evening dedicated to the trajectories of foreign students who have passed through the Beaux-Arts de Paris, with a tribute to the artist Ellsworth Kelly, featured in the exhibition.

An evening of piano music by students from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris and the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional - Ida Rubinstein de Paris.

Viewpoint visit with Hélène Delprat, artist, and Valérie Sonnier, artist and teacher at the Beaux-Arts.

Viewpoint visit to the Souvenirs de jeunesse exhibition with Daniel Schlier, artist and teacher at the Beaux-Arts, and Alice Thomine-Berrada, exhibition curator and head of collections at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

A psychiatric look at Souvenirs de jeunesse with Nassim Sarni, 2024 graduate, and Alice Thomine-Berrada, exhibition curator and head of the collections department.